


grow fonder

by kpkndy



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Blow Jobs, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jealousy, M/M, Memory Alteration, Sexual Tension, Violence, handjobs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-28 04:21:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 51,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10071257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kpkndy/pseuds/kpkndy
Summary: absence makes the heart grow fonder. or just forgetful.





	1. heavier things

**Author's Note:**

> it's my 21st birthday today! so im choosing to give!
> 
> IMPORTANT: THESE SCENES ARE NOT IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

It’s dark in Jack’s office. And quiet.   
  
Nothing but a dim, yolky lamp to warm and light the room, and nought but the sound of pen on paper --real old-school and traditional, as he signs some documents. Jesse is on the other side of the desk, curled in on himself slightly in an eames chair. He’s got a beer on the table closest to him. It’s off-hours for him, so no harm done.   
  
Even if it weren’t, he wagers Jack would smile easily and pretend not to see. And what a smile he has, too. Pretty as a picture. Jesse’d know. He saw Jack’s face on posters before he ever met the man, and thought there was no way anybody could have such pretty eyes.   
  
He doesn’t mind being wrong so much.   
  
It makes him smile to think about, and the expression catches him as he looks up at Jack again, who’s just about done signing off on some paperwork. It’s for Fallowfield, he thinks. Clearance to have some of his field memories wiped, and Jack is the one who signs off on everybody.   
  
He’s just dotting his ‘i’s and crossing his ‘t’s when he looks up and noticing Jesse staring, and smiles all of his own.   
  
“Something wrong?” He asks, in a hushed and warm sort of tone. It feels --intimate. It is intimate. Even if they’ve never breached the boundary of heated glances yet.   
  
“Nothin’ wrong.” Jesse says. He picks up his beer and considers it, for a second, before adding, “Jus’ thinkin’ about somethin’ I was readin’, and about this procedure and all.”   
  
Jack’s face twitches ever-so-slightly in the orange light. His hands move and he takes an almost imperceptible moment to right himself before looking back to Jesse with a patient, kind sort of peace. “What were you thinking about?”   
  
Jesse drops his head for a second. Tries to remember the line. Wants more than anything for Jack to think that he’s smart. “There’s this line that goes, ‘Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better’--”   
  
“--’even of their blunders’.” In a quieter voice, Jack speaks. Cuts him off only to finish the line for him. “That’s Nietzsche, isn’t it?”   
  
“Sure is.” Jesse huffs out a laugh. He leans back in the chair. “An’ here, I thought I could tell you somethin’ you didn’t already know.”   
  
“You could tell me lots of things I don’t know.” Jack says, earnestly. Ever-earnestly. He always sounds so sincere. “It’s a --it’s a good quote. I’m glad we both know it.”   
  
Jesse drops his chin into his hand. He sighs, breathlessly. “Yeah,” He agrees, quietly. His smiles wavers slightly, but not completely. “I came with a spare. T’be sure, y’know.”   
  
Jack lifts his head. He looks genuinely surprised. “A spare?”   
  
Grinning, Jesse lifts his chin out of his hand and swigs his beer. “Another quote. You, uh --you like quotes? Like famous quotes?”   
  
On the end of a gentle breath, Jack nods. He keeps his eyes on Jesse thoughtfully. “Sure.” He says, quietly. “Lay it on me.”   
  
“‘No man is rich enough to buy back his past’.” Jesse straightens in his seat. He feels smart when he says it, but that feeling quickly loses his appeal when he watches Jack’s face grow serious for a second with some emotion that’s difficult to discern. Regret, is it? Mournful? It’s so sudden and melancholy that Jesse has to say something else --anything at all to stop Jack looking so rueful. “You like Oscar Wilde?”   
  
Jack blinks, slowly. He doesn’t say anything. He just nods.   
  
“He was listed under the database as ‘Wilde, Oscar’, an’ I was so convinced I’d get his name wrong tellin’ you about it.” Jesse laughs. He says it in the hopes it’ll make Jack look a bit happier, and it’s to his utter relief that it works. A brief look of humour flashes over the man’s face as he closes the file: manila, stamped so officially and prettily. To see them always makes Jesse sad, but he doesn’t really know why.   
  
Reaching across the desk to replace his pen in the pot, Jack’s hand lingers over a trinket on it --one of the only trinkets on the desk. An old, genuine bullet for a colt revolver. Jesse thought it was the neatest thing he’d ever seen the first time he spotted it, and still does. Jack seems to take away something different, and as he leans back in his seat, he asks Jesse, “Which do you agree with more?”   
  
“What?” Jesse asks, with a mouthful of beer.   
  
Jack smiles in earnest at that. “I mean, which quote do you think is more true.” He drops his head again, but looks at Jesse with sideways, fond eyes that are too pretty to be fair.   
  
“I don’t know.” Jesse murmurs, after a second of thought. “I guess forgettin’ isn’t the worst thing somebody could do.” His mind runs over what Oscar wilde had wrote, and he shrugs. “Some things are probably better left forgotten, I reckon.”   
  
He moves his head to look at Jack directly, then, his eyes scanning over the volume of Jack’s face. It’s lineless and timeless. Jack has seen so much and still looks so young, and hale. The only darkness or advance of age that’s even visible is in those pretty blue eyes that suddenly look so heavy with sorrow that Jesse is getting up before he can help himself, and reaching across to take the side of Jack’ face in his hand.   
  
Surprised, Jack looks up at him with sudden caution, scanning Jesse for something --something unknown to Jesse that he doesn’t find.   
  
Jesse’s eyes sort of close anyway. He feels bold enough to lean forward. “You’re so--”   
  
But they open when they receive no warmth or kiss. Instead, with Jack’s hand on his heart, tender, but extended, pushing him away. “You should--” With a cough that feels stifling and loud, Jack turns his head. He looks away again, drawing in a sharp and knifelike breath. “It’s late.” Lamely, it’s all he can say.   
  
Jesse’s hand falls to his side in resignation. He feels heat suddenly cloud his face, and then even he can’t look at Jack despite the sight being so mesmerising and wonderful. “I’m --I’m sorry.” He says, quickly, swallowing on a throat no bigger than the head of a pin. “I --I shouldn’t’ve done that. I can--”   
  
“It’s alright.” Jack’s voice is surprising in volume. His hand reaches out to tap Jesse’s wrist in some kind of gesture of intimacy. “Maybe --maybe best you get some rest.”   
  
Jesse’s nostrils flare. He swallows again. “Alright, chief.” he says. Tries a watery smile as he looks up at Jack again, and then leaves the room quietly. He doesn’t look over his shoulder. He doesn’t see Jack open his top desk drawer.   
  
He treads down a half-known hallway quietly, and sneaks into bed with the warmth of Jack’s breath still present on his face.   
  
He doesn’t want to forget it.   
  
\-   
  
Jesse’s never been to Iceland before.   
  
Regardless of firsts, he dislikes it all the same by the end of the first day, as his trembling hands shake in the wind to try to light a cigarette. It’s practically futile. The wind abducts the flame of his lighter, and his lips are blue around the filter. His teeth chatter enough that he actually drops his first, and abandons it to the snow, lacking the nerve to subject his fingers to the rawness of the snow directly to pick it up. At least one of his arms is spared the feeling of cold.   
  
It’s miserable until he feels a sudden whisper of warmth fall on him as the fire door behind him opens and he hears two voices track themselves out into the snow. He doesn’t have to turn to recognise them, but does so anyway on account of his manners, and finds Commander Reyes sharing a lighter with Jack --the Strike Commander.   
  
He looks at Jack first, in a genuine, gleeful surprise, and Jack smiles back at him with the same sort of pleasure. Then Reyes is looking at Jesse, so he masters his expression into a more neutral one, and nods, respectfully.   
  
“E-evenin’, Commanders.” He shivers out the words in staccato bursts. “Lo-lovely weather we’re havin’.”   
  
Reyes, who despises the cold more than anybody, smiles at that in this cool, detached sort of way. Jack looks --well, earnest, to say the least. He looks at Gabe with a knowing sort of look as the man shivers. Jesse remembers he said once about the sunshine making the blood thin, and maybe that was why neither Jesse nor Reyes can much stand the cold.   
  
“Getting much good outta that?” Reyes interrupts the thought with a dour expression, probably from the cold. He withdraws from Jack once his own cigarette is lit, and stands between the two with his fists shoved awkwardly into his pockets.   
  
Jesse shrugs as casually as he can, stiff as he is from the chill. “Sure am t-tryin’.”   
  
Jack laughs at that, around his own cigarette. Jesse doesn’t recall having seen him smoke before, and as much as it’s a bad habit, his mouth looks awful pretty wrapped around it. Not that Jesse looks too much. Reyes stands between them like some sort of barrier with his arms folded tightly.   
  
Probably for warmth. Hopefully.   
  
Maybe he’s just trying to stop Jesse from embarrassing the unit. God knows he has the tendency to be easy with people --especially Jack. Reyes says it doesn’t reflect well on Blackwatch. Something about him showing ‘a lack of respect and procedure’. To himself, Jesse doesn’t think that’s it at all.   
  
He thinks it’s jealousy. Everybody knows that Reyes and Jack used to be close. Real close, and even if they’re friends now, and things are different, Jesse doesn’t think it’s so impossible that it gets to his commander to see Jack laughing at his jokes or drinking coffee in one of the kitchens or conversing with a free, almost intimate geniality.   
  
It’s not an ugly sort to jealousy, though. Reyes doesn’t seem bitter about it. More --more wistful. When he sees them sharing a joke or standing too close together, he interrupts it. Gives Jack this funny, thousand-yard sort of look that makes the Strike Commander suddenly busy real quickly.   
  
Jesus, maybe they are still fucking. Maybe Jesse’s had the wrong idea about it this whole time. But that doesn’t mean he can’t look at Jack. Or talk to him. Or --or think about him, and how his nose wrinkles when he laughs or how he looks with only his undershirt on.   
  
He finishes the cigarette pretty quietly as he thinks on it. It helps him not to focus on the terrible cold, or the fact that Reyes and Jack are happily talking to eachother. It’s not intimate or anything. They don’t laugh much. There’s something unsaid. Some distance there. Jesse shouldn’t be pleased by it.   
  
Deep in his own thoughts, he doesn’t realise his cigarette is still burning in his fingers until it burns him, and he drops it suddenly into the snow with a bright curse. If he'd have been holding it with his other hand, it wouldn't have been a problem.   
  
“You alright there, kid?” Reyes asks him, turning with a sort of smirk on his face despite how much he’s still shivering. Jesse sucks on part of his finger and shrugs.   
  
“Most a’ me.” He says, sniffing. He watches Reyes crush his own cigarette under his heel and nod.   
  
“Alright. See you bright an’ early tomorrow.” Reyes says, clapping a hand roughly on his shoulder, before turning to Jack. “You comin’?”   
  
Jack’s mouth opens. He blinks, one eye closing prematurely of the other before mustering. “I was, uh --I’m fine out here.”   
  
Reyes looks at him silently for a second. Then he cuts his eyes quickly to Jesse like he doesn’t know Jesse can see him, before looking back to Jack, sucking on his teeth like he’s finding something difficult to swallow. “You sure?” He asks, brusquely. “It’s pretty cold.”   
  
Jack sounds a bit more certain now, He squirms a bit under Reyes’ gaze but nods, trying to seem above it all. “I’m sure. It’s fine.”   
  
“Alright then.” Reyes nods. Nods for a few seconds, actually, like he’s trying to consider something. Only after that pause does he turn, looking at Jesse very seriously. “Coming in?”   
  
Jesse shakes his head. A fumbling hand pats the pack of cigarettes in his top pocket.   
  
“Those things’ll kill you.” Reyes tells him, in that same serious voice. Like he wasn’t just smoking all of his own. Like he gives a damn about Jesse’s health and isn’t just unhappy with the prospect of leaving him to talk to Jack.   
  
Jesse sucks the burnt part of his finger, “They’re sure trying.” Reyes roll his eyes --but Jack laughs, in the corner of Jesse’s eyes. It’s small. He would’ve missed it if he wasn't paying attention. Still, the Commander turns heel, and Jesse says, “Night, boss.” in the nicest voice he can.   
  
Reyes doesn’t reply. He treads quietly back towards the door, and Jesse watches him go nervously. Enjoying the thrill of the slight disobedience. Enjoying Jack’s company --and only Jack’s.   
  
When they’re finally alone, Jesse reaches into his top pocket and struggles with the carton until he has another cigarette between his lips. He speaks around it, clumsily, when he looks up at Jack with a smile. “Y’want one?”   
  
Jack looks at him. His gaze fixes on the cigarette before moving up to Jesse’s eyes. “That’s okay.” He doesn’t even sound like he feels the cold. His voice is as steady as rising steam. “I normally just take a few drags from when Gabe smokes.”   
  
Jesse pats himself down for his lighter. “I don’t mind sharin’ if you don’t.” He brings the clear zippo out and tries to light it a few hands, but it’s empty anyway, and doesn’t get beyond a spark.   
  
He’s about to be frustrated when Jack’s hand comes forward with a metal lighter of his own, snapping it open and coming up with a long, bright flame on the first try, strident and beautiful. It illuminates the hand holding the lighter. Makes Jack‘s skin look golden. The action is so bold that Jesse looks up in surprise, finding Jack’s eyes.   
  
After a drag, he takes it from his mouth, and holds it out, murmuring, “Ain’t you prepared?” He exhales a plume of smoke. “That’s a neat trick for a guy that don’t hardly smoke.”   
  
Jack smiles easily. He tils his head. “It’s always useful to have one to hand.”   
  
Jesse lets out a laugh. “Sure it is. Y’get your smokes for free.”   
  
“There are other reasons.” Reaching out, Jack takes the cigarette that Jesse’s holding out. Their fingers brush. Jack feels warm. “But that’s a pretty good one.” He takes in in his pretty mouth and Jesse feels almost rude for watching, but he can’t help himself. There’s no Reyes to gatekeep the sight, and lord, Jesse wishes he was the damn cigarette so that Jack would let him in and love every minute of it.   
  
But Jesse can’t well say that, so they both end up in silence. An extending silence, and it wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t catch eachother looking at the other a few times. They pass the cigarette to and fro without disrupting the quiet. Jesse tries to think of something witty to say, but he finds himself coming up empty.   
  
After a while, Jack says, “You’re quiet tonight.”   
  
Jesse doesn’t know if he understands the word ‘tonight’. They rarely spend much time together. Almost never alone --like this, and Jesse’s already fouling it up with his silence. “I guess I’m jus’ tryna avoid the bossman cuttin’ into me about the way I talk t’you.”   
  
Almost immediately, Jack says, “I like the way you talk to me.” Then, stifled, he frowns. “I mean, I don’t think it’s anything that needs disciplinary action.” He passes the cigarette to Jesse. “I won’t tell Gabe if you don’t.”   
  
Gabe. Jack always calls him that. Even though he’s been serving with Miss Ana and some of the others for just as long, probably, he never calls any of them by their first names. Nobody else gets to have that.   
  
Crestfallen, Jesse shrugs. “Maybe I jus’ can’t think of anythin’ to say.”   
  
“Oh.” Jack blinks. He nods. The silence returns, a napalm sort of emptiness that twitches like fire. Jesse tries to think of something to say, but all he can think about is Reyes, now. The way Jack says ‘Gabe’ so easily, like it fits in his pretty mouth just fine.   
  
And the more he thinks about it, the more it begins to bother him. He has to ask.   
  
Jesse takes the cigarette when it’s extended to him. As he does, Jack says, “You think of anything to say yet?”   
  
Jesse coughs gently and stuffs his fists into his pockets. “As a matter a’ fact, I did.” He says, awkwardly. “But, uh --you--” He looks at Jack briefly. “You’re uh, you’re the boss and all, so I don’t wanna offend you or anythin’.”   
  
Maybe it’s just a trick of the nerves, but when Jack takes the cigarette back, his movements are less precise. Like he’s intending to brush Jesse’s hand more. “That doesn’t sound like the normal, mindless, boring getting-to-know you spiel.” He laughs. “It sounds like you’ve actually got something to say.”   
  
“I do.” Jesse says, quickly, reveling in the way Jack had just sounded --refreshed. Intruiged. “I really do, I jus’ --it’s like I said. It’s --it’s jus’ you gotta promise not to be offended.”   
  
Jack laughs again. He huffs it out with  a cloud of smoke and Jesse realizes that they’ll both smell the same after this. They’ll both be wearing that scent of his brand of cigarettes. “But I don’t know what you’re going to say.” He says, frowning playfully. “You can tell me to brace myself, sure --but you can’t ask me to promise something like that.”   
  
Jesse smiles himself. He shakes his head. “Maybe jus’ forget it, then.”   
  
Jack is offering him the cigarette when he hears that, and suddenly draws it back in like he’s withholding it. “I don’t think so.” He says, cooly. “It’s too late. I’m already intrigued.”   
  
“Is that a fact?”   
  
Jack looks at him again. He smiles so candidly. Jesus, Jesse doesn’t know if he can get through the sentence if Jack keeps looking at him like that. So he looks away, and tries.   
  
“Alright, here goes.” Swallowing, Jesse looks towards the cigarette. He could use the courage. “What d’you make a the bossman thesedays?” Jack turns his head and looks at the other man. He doesn’t look affronted at all. Neutral. Maybe even wistful. “You, uh --you particularly close?”   
  
Jack’s eyes move to a patch of snowy ground. He tilts his head. “Sure.”   
  
Jesse goes to ask, but stops himself. He doesn’t know how to phrase it, or even if he wants to know, really. Apparently he does, because before he can really stop himself, he says, “Reyes.” Awkwardly, he scratches his cheek and coughs again. “You two, uh --you used to go around together, yeah? Y’were real close?”   
  
Jack’s nostrils flare for a second. He takes another drag. His mouth looks warm and gentle when he opens it to say, “Is that a fact?”   
  
It doesn’t look like Jack was expecting this topic of conversation at all. The heavier things have made the air feel colder. That playful geniality has shriveled up and Jesse wishes in his own way that he’d never said anything. But then he’d just be wondering about it, and driving himself crazy.   
  
Never could keep his fingers off a scab.   
  
“Naw, it ain’t like that.” Jesse says, eventually, trying to sound neutral. “Jus’ somethin’ I heard.”   
  
“Who told you?” When he looks up, he can see the tiny stub of the cigarette being offered to him. Maybe it’s the cold, but Jack looks like he’s ever-so-slightly trembling. He’s smiling this thousand-yard smile that Jesse recognises from Reyes.   
  
Jesse shrugs. It wasn’t one thing or person. Just lots of little things. Just the strange sort of stifled intimacy he sees between the two of them. So he says, “Oh, y’know. ‘ _They_ ’.”   
  
Jack’s eyes roll. He’s still sort of smiling. “ _They_ talk a lot, don’t they?”   
  
At that, Jesse laughs. Jack joins him, and for the strained nature of the conversation, that moment in itself is worth it. Jack is laughing --he’s alone with Jesse, and wanting to be there, even if he can’t think of anything to say and just says, “They sure do.” As he crushes the dying cigarette beneath his heel.   
  
Then the laughter peters off, and Jack looks suddenly stricken before he draws his arms in and turns towards the door. “I’m --I’m going to head back inside.”   
  
He walks himself to the door, too, and Jesse thinks that the conversation is just going to end like that, and he’ll have to stand there in the cold and think about how instead of keeping things lighthearted and actually having a real conversation with Jack, he went straight for the femoral artery.   
  
But Jack turns, before the door, and asks him, “Staying out?”   
  
He nods. “You’re s’posed to be able to see the Northern Lights when it gets later, and I ain’t never seen them before.” Words are a bit harder to fathom when Jack turns back around to face him.   
  
Looking, of all things, devastated.   
  
“I, uh, I hear they’re really something.” he says, uselessly. “Better than--”   
  
“Better than fireworks.” Jack finishes for him, weakly. He still looks so tragic that Jesse feels awkward to laugh.   
  
“How’d you know I was gonna say that?” He asks, trying to keep them talking. Trying to bring back the moment when they were laughing together. “You some kinda psychic?”   
  
Jack does laugh, too. Almost bitterly. A single, sad little sound as he shrugs. “Something like that.” He turns again to go back inside and Jesse practically goes after him, reaching out but becoming self-conscious when he splutters.   
  
“You don’t wanna stay? For the, uh --for the lights, I mean?”   
  
Jack lets out a very tight breath. “I’ve seen them before.” He says, quietly. “Goodnight, McCree.”   
  
Not _Jesse_ . Not like _Gabe_ .   
  
So Jesse says, “G’night, Jack.”   
  
The dissent, if you could call it that, is noted. Jack hesitates when he hears it.   
  
But he lets it be, all the same.   
  
\-   
  
Jesse hisses through his teeth. He hears a warm noise of mirth.   
  
It’s by his ear, but he can’t see the mouth it feel from. Not from where he’s sat slumped, his forehead against a bare shoulder. There’s a hand on the back on his neck, too, and working over his cock and every point of contact is hotter than the sun and so much more radiant.   
  
Jack’s breathing is fast and hard, too, like he’s the one getting this treatment. Jesse can feel his exhalations on his own shoulder as Jack’s twists his hand ever so slightly and strokes Jesse firm and good like he’s savouring the sensation. It’s enough to have Jesse biting his lip to keep the noise in. He’s so fucking hard he wouldn’t be surprised if Jack can feel his pulse.   
  
Then Jack twists his hand again and Jesse grinds out the word, “ _Fuck_ .”   
  
Intimately, in a hot whisper he hears Jack give another pleased hum. His pace continues, unrelenting and gorgeous. Jesse feels practically lightheaded. He can’t feel anything but the points of contact between them --can’t see anything but Jack and the way he moves his hand that makes Jesse’s stomach go tight and hot. Jesus, he can barely breathe.   
  
It feels so sudden when Jack shifts to bite him. Nearer the back of the neck, brazen and hard enough that Jesse’s mouth opens again and he whines, “Jack--”   
  
“That’s it, Jess.” Jack breathes. God, he sounds so fucking pleased with himself, his voice is like steam and Jesse is evaporating under his touch. He doesn’t think he can last much longer. Not with the way Jack is working over the head of his cock with a little twist. Not with the way he grips the base nice and tight and tugs up with this hungry sort of desperation that might literally kill Jesse. “Fuck --you’re so--”   
  
Jesse’s eyes squeeze themselves closed. “I’m gonna--” he pants.   
  
“Hang on.” Jack’s voice is even more ragged when he speaks again. His pace doesn’t let up, and god, Jesse doesn’t even think he’ll get to hear the end of the sentence without finishing like a fucking teenager. “Just a little longer, Jess, I got you.”   
  
Jesse whines again. His jaw clamps itself shut. His balls are tight and it’s taking everything he has not to cum suddenly, all over Jack’s chest and his, so that they’d be matching, and Jack would smell like him --alike, like a couple of cats in heat.   
  
“Jack,” He coughs out again, uselessly. He feels like he could burst at the seams, begging like this.   
  
Jack understands --but doesn’t relent. He sucks where he’d bitten, feeling Jesse shiver and reveling in it when he murmurs, “Just a bit longer.”   
  
Even his voice is overwhelming and far too present. Jesse thinks a feather could knock him down. His skin burns with the intensity of it --like he’s one live wire, electrified but still as all hell as Jack keeps going. He’s getting faster, and even with his eyes closed it’s audible and it’s so gorgeous that Jesse thinks he must be melting.   
  
He shakes his head when he knows he can’t hold out any longer. When he’s certain --voice wrecked, coming out of his pin-hole throat when he hisses, “I can’t--”   
  
Jack whispers, “That’s it.”   
  
Jesse doesn’t even cry out. He doesn’t have that in him, and just huffs out a weak, overstimulated groan as he comes, at long last, every cell in his body suddenly illuminated by paradise as he finishes in two hot spurts, making a mess of himself and Jack and nearly collapsing backwards at the relief of it all, of the pleasure that’s so intense he feels render useless by it.   
  
The hand on the back on his neck pulls him forward, though, not backwards, and as he breathes through his comedown he feels the warmth of Jack’s chest against his face. He can hear Jack’s heartbeat --racing, but even and salient. He can smell the other man’s skin, too, faint sandalwood beneath the sweat, enough to make the mixture masculine and refined.   
  
Jesse tries to get his breath back. He feels top-heavy and wrecked. The invigorated part will come in a few minutes. For now, he’s spent.   
  
Eventually, the hand on the back of his neck starts to pet his hair affectionately. He hears Jack murmurs, “You good?”   
  
Jesse nods. He clears his throat. “You gotta stop edgin’ me. I ain’t gonna survive.” He lets out a weak laugh, after, and Jack laughs, too.   
  
“Oh, you’re fine.” He says, warmly, moving to kiss Jesse on his jaw, and then on his cheek. His voice is all breathy and excited. It’s so arresting. He can feel Jesse smile against him, easing into it, practised as they are with this.   
  
Practised enough that Jack doesn’t have to check the manual lock on the door anymore, or even glance over at it, and relaxed enough that he’s happy to watch the younger man sprawl out on his back like a cat in a patch of sunlight. No longer a cameo lover, secreted in and out of Jack’s room and affections. A fixture.   
  
Where he lies, Jesse doesn’t even bother to clean himself up. He doesn’t look like he’s got a worry in the world. Jack uses the edge of a sheet to brush himself down, at least, before he comes to lie on his side next to Jesse. The younger man feels warm, still, not feverish, but like the pleasant glow of sitting by a fireside.   
  
Eventually, Jesse turns to his side to curl into Jack, and he murmurs, “You’re gonna get the sheets dirty.”   
  
Jesse huffs out a laugh. “They’re already dirty.”   
  
“Dirt _ier_ .” Jack’s resistance stops there, really. He is helpless but to have Jesse move his hands, bring Jack back to him, closer than before, so that they both end up as filthy as the other. “Mature.” He mutters, and doesn’t mean it in the slightest.   
  
Still, it’s worth it to hear Jesse let out another breathless laugh, nudging Jack with a toe, vying for even more attention. “Y’love it.” He croons.   
  
For a second, the air sort of stills. It’s not a word either of them have yet breached --a dangerous frontier that, when crossed, would force them both to realise what they’re putting on the table.   
  
Jack’s never been scared of much, and even if it takes him a second, he drops his head into Jesse’s shoulder and nods fondly. Trying to breathe the other man in. To remember the moment and every detail that compromises it. Maybe he can.   
  
“I love you,” He says, gently. Then, just to be difficult. “Even if you’re a pig.”   
  
Jesse laughs again. One of his hands is stroking up Jack’s back. “Well, hey, I love you too.” He says, sincerely. “Even if _you’re_ an ass-aching puritan.”


	2. strange devices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again --these scenes aren't in chronological order! 
> 
> the first and last scenes are linked, though. 
> 
> yes, jack reads nat geo like a nerd. he also probably has a subscription to tractors monthly.

The old mainframe is still the same.    
  
Jesse has a holoscreen up over the bare table and he crosses the room towards it. It’s the first warm and safe place he’s had to stay in years. That isn’t to say that the door isn’t locked and he hasn’t scouted for bugs, but he feels practically calm. Distantly, he can hear the sea, and it reminds him of being much younger.    
  
Thosedays, he somehow had more to his name than the clothes on his back and his peacekeeper, in pieces on the table, ready to be cleaned and reassembled.    
  
He remembers, once, seeing Ana’s desk for the first time, littered with pictures and trinkets that belong to memories of other places. She’d said that it happened more by passage of time than purpose --that age helped her accumulative things. Jesse guesses he’s just living in reverse.    
  
Tired, he slumps himself into a chair he’d purloined for the room --an old desk one with most of the wheels stiff and stuck. He feels the same way as he gets to work, using the lights of the holoscreen to work by.    
  
It used to be an easier job when he has both hands. Both of his own hands, anyway. The prosthetic could use a tune, but they’re running low on basic supplies as is, given that the base has only been back in operation for a little while. And if he asks Torbjörn, the man will insist he take it off.    
  
Jesse would rather it hang there and not work at all than take it off for a single second.    
  
So he works, slowly, scrolling through the holoscreens of personal data. Of Jack’s. Not to be sentimental or trite --he’s looking for something. And if the dull ache under the bandage in his shoulder from a shotgun shell if anything to go by, it’s important he finds it. He’s searching under the files Jack had last accessed, going back through them to see if what he’s looking for will show itself.    
  
It’s mostly innocuous, though. Backissues of National Geographic, research about travel, receipts from any online texts that he’d checked out. Amongst them, a few times, is Jesse’s personnel file, and he lingers over it for a few seconds, caught feeling some kind of a way. There’s nothing intimate about the information in there, he knows. It was probably just to check or reference something, but it sticks with Jesse nonetheless.    
  
Further in, there are files under Ana’s name that Jack had been exploring. One, in particular, that comes up twice. It’s of them, amazingly. On the dusty horizon of the watchpoint at Grand Mesa. Their figures are small but there. When Jesse zooms for clarity, he sees that he’s holding Jack’s hand.    
  
It’s evidence. Hard, untampered evidence. But he doesn’t remember the picture being taken at all. And even if it were a mere matter of forgetting, the timestamp on the picture only serves to confuse his memory more. God knows Jack didn’t engage him like that until they were stationed at--   
  
There! Three files before it, he sees what he’s looking for. An encrypted file with no preview available. He can’t even view the files properties. Jesse tries to open it up but nothing happens, and when he tries again, he hears Athena’s synthetic voice warn him gently, “Access denied.”    
  
“I got Q-clearance.” Jesse complains, trying to open the file again, staring angrily at the inert, black box named ‘n0th3rn-l1ght5’. The only thing left on this damn mainframe worth salvaging. When nothing happens, he tries again.    
  
“Access denied.” Is all he gets for his efforts.    
  
“Corrupted file?” He tries to run an analytic on it, but that also gets nowhere.    
  
“Negative.” Athena tells him. “Clearance insufficient.”    
  
“But I’ve got--”   
  
“Personnel Clearance insufficient.”    
  
Jesse presses down on the bandage on his shoulder. He swallows. A personnel clearance issue: meaning, access has been denied strictly to him. Not something Jack is trying to hide from the world. Not something he was trying to hide from Gabe in those last, fatal days.    
  
Something he was trying to hide from Jesse.    
  
-   
  
“Anything, huh?”    
  
Jesse works the rope through his fingers for a second. He considers the proposition. He nods.    
  
“Oh, sure.” He says easily, over the noise of the general party chatter, and the distance holiday music. He’s never had a clue people really celebrated christmas like this --like how they do in movies, until he’d been signed up. And even then, he’s only been secreted into an overwatch function on account of the bossman’s largesse.    
  
Naturally, he takes it as an opportunity to show his skills.    
  
“Here,” He says, and starts to twirl the rope gently in a loop by his feet to give it some momentum. “Jus’ you watch.”    
  
He always was a natural with the lasso. Since it’s less-than-nice origins of being fourteen and standing on a deserted strip of highway with some rope he’d been given, told to tie the hostages, and through to his years of taking watch and having nothing else to do. Never then did he dream he’d be here, admist the banners and the world-renowned soldiers, demonstrating this bizarre skill for his new god.    
  
But then a blonde passes --young and pretty, a girl no older than him, and before he can really think about what he’s doing, Jesse’s tossed the loop of rope over her wrists and is drawing it to a closer, bringing her towards him.    
  
His other idol --Miss Ana, claps gently. The blonde girl caught in his trap lets out a breath of surprise. She unencumbers herself quickly, just as Jesse thinks to say, “Sorry about that, Miss.”    
  
The bossman just laughs while the girl extricates herself and scurries off. She’s known to Miss Ana, and Jesse can tell because they share a look. For his part, the trick feels underwhelming. Instead of feeling sharp and all proud, he is mostly embarrassed.    
  
Still, Reyes tells him, “Not bad, kid. But not great.”    
  
“I’m jus’ warmin’ up.” He says, defensively, loosening the circle to prepare for another throw. He twirls it at his feet in a solid, circular motion, and looks up at the both of them. “How about a challenge?”    
  
Miss Ana is the one to pipe up, unsurprisingly. With an easy gesture, she points towards a table heaving with amenities --bowls of food and drinks, unopened bottles and bags. “Is a beer bottle challenge enough?”    
  
The rope continues to twirl in a circle. Jesse jumps in and out of the spinning loop without closing it like he’s playing jump-rope. “A bottle, huh?” He step out of it and twirls it at the height of his midsection lazily. He pointedly doesn’t mention how he used to rope empty cans off the fence when he was real bored.    
  
Before he throws, he looks at Reyes for some kind of encouragement. The bossman is smiling easily. His arms are folded. One of his hands is holding a lowball of whiskey in a lax hand. “Go on, then.” Is all he says. It’s all Jesse needs to hear.    
  
He tosses the rope with a careful precision, slipping it over the top before he sees the hand reaching to grasp it. No, by the time Jesse realise he’s caught yet another partygoer in his rope, he’s already closed the loop, unsure of whether or not to pull the rope or leave it be.    
  
No choice to make --a large hand frees itself. An affable voice laughs, “I didn’t realise you were using the beer as bait.”    
  
Jesse knows that face immediately --that voice.    
  
He’s seen news reports before. Seen a million of the same posters pasted up in a million different cities. And the picture is more accurate than Jesse could have ever imagined, because, looking like he just stepped out of the damn picture, Strike Commander Jack Morrison is standing behind the table across from them.    
  
The bossman’s boss. The end of the line when it comes to authority.    
  
Jesse’s jaw works itself open and shut uselessly. He doesn’t think to do anything. He can’t.    
  
But the Strike Commander doesn’t seem the least bit phased. “You bringing lasso’s back as some new covert strategy?”    
  
The bossman lets out a short laugh. “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.” He taps his nose. “It’s confidential, y’know.”    
  
“Is that right?” The Strike Commander opens the bottle with a careless half-twist. He comes around the table and Jesse feels tiny and uncomfortable, unsure of his place in the conversation and party, suddenly. If he even has one.    
  
“That’s right.” He only catches Reyes smiling at the end of the expression. But the fondness that sparks to life from the encounter remains, and it’s genuine enough that it takes Jesse by surprise. Miss Ana looks between them like she’s seen this a thousand times before, and they can all sense that dirtiest of dirty words without having to point it out: history.    
  
It’s clearer, still, when they’re standing practically shoulder-to-shoulder, and the bossman cants his head slightly. “Taking the night off?”    
  
Miss Ana even chimes in. “For once.”    
  
It’s not an accusation. The Strike Commander dips his head and nods like he’s being chided affectionately. “For once.” He concedes, with a smile. Jesse wonders if he’s in trouble for even being here. But the initial wariness is gone. He wouldn’t mind being apprehended if it means that he’s holding all of the Strike Commander’s attentions for a few seconds.    
  
As if on cue, Morrison gestures to him. “So, who’s the cowboy?”    
  
Miss Ana laughs. Even the bossman fights off another smile. Jesse can’t tell if he’s being mocked or not, and without thinking, he stands nervously to attention, adding his best salute for good measure. “Jesse McCree, Sir.”    
  
That gets laughed at even more. “Jesus, kid.” Reyes says, rolling his eyes, looking almost embarrassed on behalf of the kid before he turns back to Morrison without any of that fanfare. “He’s the kid I was telling you about. The one we picked up out west.”    
  
“Oh.” Morrison makes a noise of understanding. He looks back to Jesse and smiles, warmly. God, he’s achingly handsome, with his hemingway jaw and his strong, masculine features. “I’ve heard plenty about you, Jesse. It sounds like you’re going to do great things for Blackwatch.”    
  
Jesse wonders if he isn’t imagining the moment. If it’s true that one of the most important men in the world and think something of him --can sound so sincere when they say it. He feels practically dizzy, coiling the rope with nervous fingers. “Well, thankyou, sir--”   
  
“Just Jack.” He says, easily. “Unless I’m wearing the coat, Jack is fine.”    
  
He offers his large and unmarred hand. Jesse thinks it must be a joke.    
  
For a second, he looks at Miss Ana and then back to the bossman. Neither of them have any assurances to offer him either way. They’re both caught up with looking at the other man. At Jack.    
  
Jesse feels himself swallow. He takes the hand offered to him nervously, and the handshake only lasts a second or so. It feels longer than that. It feels more important.    
  
And then it’s over, because Miss Ana is telling him about somebody else --some other bright new talent that’s going to do so much for all of them, and they’re walking away before Jesse can do something, disappearing between furniture and people, leaving him to Reyes, who’s watching Jack depart with some kind of wistfulness.    
  
“Isn’t he insufferable?” the bossman murmurs into the rim of his glass, with no real malice in his voice.    
  
“Sure.” Jesse says, mindlessly. That’s not what he thinks at all.    
  
What he thinks is that for a second, all of the Strike Commander’s attention had belonged to him.    
  
Nobody else. Just him.    
  
-   
  
The news only comes in as they’re landing.    
  
It’s just like Gabe to do that.    
  
So Jack waits uneasily in the wing of the infirmary for the transport to touch down, and Ana remains at his side, ever-vigilant. A soothing presence in the same way that the sun is when it hangs low on the horizon, reminding him that however terrible, this too will pass.    
  
She sits, but the last things Jack can think to do is sit. All his life, he’s been told by other people to sit before hearing bad news. Why anybody would think taking it sitting is any the better for him, he’s never known. As if his comfort would make a difference on a matter like this. As if it would bring Jesse to him any safer or faster.    
  
“You’re pacing again.” Ana says, after a few moments of silence, and Jack stops in his tracks when he realises it is. “You’re going to wear yourself out.”    
  
Jack thinks about the day he’s had. Christ, the life. This isn’t going to be the thing that snatches the wind from his sails. “I can’t just sit here.” He says, emptily. “I have to do something.”    
  
Ana has known him too long to feel a great deal of pity for him. They both know he’s winding himself up. He’s always been good at that: centering his thoughts on the worst-case-scenario, coming up with these little fictions that he protects as he bows to fear. He thinks about Jesse lying in his bed a few days ago, resting and at peace with the world.    
  
He thinks about Jesse lying in another bed, comatose and pained, with wires dripping from him as they worm their way into any open space they can find.    
  
“Jesse isn’t a fool.” Ana is the one to break the silence again. Her voice is calm and steady with wisdom. She is a good woman for a crisis. “He won’t have gotten himself into anything he can’t get himself out of.”    
  
She’s right about that. For all of his bravado, Jesse is terrified by death. If he can avoid a firefight, he will. Maybe it’s Deadlock that did it to him, or maybe the instinct was forged before that, but Jesse’s good at keeping himself alive.    
  
“Maybe it’s not Jesse I’m worried about.” Jack murmurs. He chews on the corner of a nail absently.    
  
“What do you mean by that?” He can feel Ana’s eyes on him as he stares at some bleak corner of the room. He doesn’t say anything. “You think this is Gabriel’s doing?” She lets out an angry laugh. “You don’t really believe--”   
  
“Don’t act like it’s so impossible.” Jack turns on her, them, sounding uglier than he means to. “Things haven’t been right between us in a long time.”    
  
“Nobody is disagreeing with that.” She says, without missing a beat. “But looking for somewhere to put what you’re feeling right now is only going to make things worse.” There’s nothing he can say to that. At least, nothing that immediately springs to mind, because he knows she’s right. “Gabriel isn’t your enemy.”    
  
Jack slows his movements. He sighs, again. “Thesedays I’m not so sure.”    
  
They’re going in circles. Even with her infinite patience, Ana’s tone is clipped when she says, “All I’m sure of is that whatever condition Jesse is in when he arrives has nothing to do with what’s between you to.” She shakes her head tiredly. “I think you overestimate how much he still thinks about you.”    
  
It’s not any attack at all on Jack’s pride, but somehow it still hurts. It seeps into the cracks to a place he didn’t know still existed. He feels so sure that Gabe still thinks about him, because he still thinks about Gabriel. There’s a bit of him in everything Jesse does, the younger man’s star hitched so tightly to his boss’ wagon. Maybe that’s what drew him to Jesse to begin with.    
  
Maybe that’s why it still hurts, now and again, on both sides of the gun.    
  
He can’t find it in him to pace any more. The feeling Jack thought he’d forgotten seeps into his bones and he forgets his paranoia enough to sit.    
  
“For Jesse’s sake.” He says, reedily. “I hope you’re right.”    
  
And she is. Ana always is.    
  
It’s barely fifteen minutes later and Jesse is wheeled by to go straight to biotics, both of his legs broken to all hell. He’s sat up, though, a pulse clip on the thumps-up he’s giving Jack as they reunite, very briefly. It’s all they get before Jesse is sent to heal up. Anything more would look overbearing. Unprofessional. Ana helps him to let go of the younger man with a quiet cough.    
  
Later, of course, they reunite when tensions are running less high. When Jesse is stuck back together again, still sojourned in a medical bed with his feet up, reading a holozine and looking relatively at peace. Without any medical staff around, he doesn’t have to hide the expression of relief when it comes across his face to see Jack. He doesn’t even have to lift his hand in a salute that feels overly-auspicious.    
  
“Hey there,” Jesse murmurs, in a tired voice. He swipes at the holozine that’s illuminating his features in neon and making the shadows on his face look dramatic and handsome so it disappears. “What’s a guy like you doin’ in a place like this?”    
  
The attempt at levity is brave. Jack thinks that if it weren’t so late in the evening he’d be chewing Jesse out for that. For making light of this. Christ, he can barely look at the casts as he passes them, coming to perch on the edge of the mattress.    
  
“Enjoying the ambience, clearly.” He says, matching Jesse’s tone. One of his hands smooths down a patch of bed by Jesse’s arm. They begin touching instinctively, without any clear initiation or direction. “Couldn’t think of a better place for a reunion.”    
  
At that, Jesse lets out a short laugh. His smile is a little heavy on one side. It has the blurry look of someone who isn’t altogether there. They’ve probably given him something for the pain. “Anybody ever tell you that you got a funny idea a’ romantic?” He breathes, smiling.    
  
Jack looks away.    
  
But only for a second.    
  
“I might have heard that somewhere before.” He shrugs.    
  
He tries not to dwell on it, but it hurts, distantly, all the same, and before he can think to pull it together, he’s moving to lean over the other man. Just to --to hold him. Just to feel Jesse there. He wants to confirm the moment. To make sure it’s real.    
  
And Jesse, for his part, puts up no real resistance or fight. He’s receptive to it almost immediately, blind to the melancholy of it, undoubtedly, and just glad to be held. He buries his face into Jack’s shoulder appreciatively, and sighs there. “Missed ya,” Jack hears him say, in a fatigue-soft voice that should be hard as metal but comes out as gentle as nostalgia.    
  
He doesn’t want to let go of Jesse. He does, though, managing to ask, “What happened?” It’s the elephant in the room. It’s the thing keeping Jesse in convalescence tonight instead of warmer, safer sheets. Something he can’t help but feel was intentional. “If something happened --if --if Reyes put you in a situ--”   
  
“That ain’t how it was at all,” Jesse yawns, waving a hand dismissively like the idea is foolish. “Had to make a quick getaway. Misjuded the height.”    
  
It’s a poor story. Plausible, but poor, and Jack pulls back to look at Jesse, searching the familiar featured for some microexpression. For the barest hint of a lie. Before he can find one, Jesse drops his head into Jack affectionately. “Oh, it ain’t so bad.” He promises. “I’ll only be outta action a few days.”    
  
That doesn’t do anything for Jack’s fear. He has to hide it away himself, trying to be of some sort of use to Jesse by being pleasant and comforting. He works his hand’s through the other man’s dark hair. It’s matted a bit from the pillow, so he’s gentle, and even if it does hurt, Jesse doesn’t seem to mind a bit. Ana was the one who discovered it, he thinks --that playing with his hair soothes him like nothing else.    
  
A few minutes pass like that. There’s no resistance in Jesse at all. He feels content to sit up like that, with his head against Jack’s chest, drifting in and out of lucidity by degrees. Jack thinks him practically asleep when he hears the other man mumble, “You’re quiet.”    
  
He doesn’t know what to say --torn between being easy or being honest. It’s not like they get many of these moments together. Not anymore, at least.    
  
Jack goes for a mixture of both, trying to sound impassive when he says, “I’m just thinking. That’s all.”    
  
Jesse makes a noise of amusement. “Think out loud then for me, wouldja?” He noses at jack as if vying for what’s in the other man’s head. God, he always has been a wiseass. Too smart for his own good --too keen at spotting windows of opportunity. Jesse can smell out uncertainty and weakness even if it’s a hundred miles away, and then zero on in it. Jack just doesn’t much like being under a microscope.    
  
“I, uh --I’m just overreacting.” He says, stifled, after a few seconds of trying to censor his own thoughts. There’s too much he could possibly say, and now isn’t the time. Even when Jesse sighs in a way that suggests he’s unsatisfied, the best Jack can do is murmur, “I worry about you.”    
  
It’s for the better. At least it makes Jesse laugh. “Gee, y’don’t say.” He says, unhelpfully, before going to move backwards, able to lie back again and get a real look at Jack. To read his eyes. “I worry about you too, y’know. It --it ain’t in your job description to do this alone.”     
  
“Do what?”    
  
Jesse’s eyes roll like he’s heard too much of something. “Any a’ this.” His voices sounds so tender, suddenly. He’s palming at Jack’s hand with this sort of nervous longing. “There ain’t nothin y’can’t say. Hell, if you were sittin’ on the news that tomorrow mornin’ one a’ those nuclear warheads was gonna burst through the ceilin’ and there weren’t no room in the shelter, I’d --I’d wanna know.”    
  
He exhales through his nose. Jack sighs. “Jess--”   
  
“I mean it.” Jesse tells him. “I’d --I’d wanna know, and I’d wanna be with you.”    
  
It’s so left of centre that Jack hardly knows how to reply. He thinks it’s a kindness to say, “I’d never ask you to do that.” But the moment he says it, he realises how it sounds.    
  
“Wouldn’t have to,” Jesse yawns, without missing a beat. He tilts hi head and looks at Jack in some sort of way like his heart is peeking out through his eyes. “I’m on your side. M’on your side and Reyes is too, if you’d let him be.”    
  
There’s a sudden dissonance in the tone of Jack’s interpretation when Jesse says Gabe’s name. Like the scene, with all of it’s tenderness and love, has no place for that memory. Jesse can see that much on his face, having sensed to awkwardness and the things left unsaid between them for as long as he’s been here.    
  
“I know I complicate the narrative between you two and all,” Jesse shrugs, “But he saved my ass today, Jack, and it ain’t the first time.”    
  
Jack thinks ‘he didn’t even tell me you were hurt’. But what he says is, “I know.” He feels himself nod. Maybe what Jesse’s saying is true. Maybe, like Ana, he’s right, and Jack is just paranoid or guilty about it all. But there are no real answers right now, so he brushes Jesse’s hand, again, gently, and changes the subject, “You’re okay, though?”    
  
“Tired,” Jesse breathes. His eyes look heavier than before. His breathing is still accented and deep. It’s enchanting. Enough so that Jack comes forward carefully and kisses him, lingering there as they part briefly before taking his lips again. Jesse smiles into it, murmuring, “Not too tired, though.” He grins.    
  
Jack rolls his eyes. He doesn’t move away. “You got a funny idea of romantic, Jess.” Playfully, he ruffles the other man’s hair. “You should get some rest.”    
  
Sobering slightly, Jesse nods. “Yeah.” In a childish sort of movement, he tracers the back of Jack’s hand and looks at the sheets before mustering the courage to ask, “Will I see ya in the mornin’?”    
  
Jack nods before he can help it. “I’ll try to get away.” He says. They kiss again, briefer, though, and then he’s standing up to go. “See you then, huckleberry.” he says, just to be difficult.    
  
Jesse smiles, all the same. “See y’then.”    
  
(Later, he passes Gabriel in the hall, and he stops to say, “Thankyou.” Quietly. An afterthought. “For getting him home safely.”    
  
They embrace, briefly. Jack is stunned into inertia by it --by seeing Gabe come forward and put his arms around him. It’s unromantic, but assuring. Meaningful between friends, and then over. They part like nothing ever happened.    
  
Gabe never did accustom himself to the autocrat’s ‘ _ not in front of the others _ ’. )   
  
-   
  
In the middle of the night, Jesse wakes suddenly.    
  
He doesn’t know where he is, at first. Not used to the bed. Not used to the room, or being back on the old watchpoint. Sudden, soft light wakes him, in an artificial neon, and Jesse is halfway to his gun, still at pace on the table, when he sees what’s woken him. 

  
Not an intruder, nor even Athena.   
  
Something else.   
  
The holoscreen he’d left open on the table before retiring to sleep is hissing with static. The idle, green light of Athena’s menu when on standby is a strident and aggressive pink, and over the dark, black box of the ‘n0th3rn-l1ght5’ icon, he sees a pixelated mexican skull.   
  
It hangs in the air for a few seconds as Jesse studies it. He reaches for his gun anyway. He doesn’t know if he’s dreaming.   
  
Then the skull disappears, and text appears over the icon in the same furious shade of pink.   
  
_‘Considera tus pecados’_   
  
It takes him a moment to translate what he’s reading.   
  
_‘Think on your sins’_  
  
Then the words disappear. And the file opens. 


	3. true affection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this killed the man to write. but it's here!!  
> s/o to my wonderful beta grant and all of my mc76 squad. i love y'all. 
> 
> ['people incapable of guilt usually do have a pretty good time']

Jack’s finally asleep. That’s both good, and bad.   
  
His cigarette is burning in the ashtray on the far nightstand. Gabriel gets out of the bed and walks around to finish it off. It wouldn’t be worth the risk of waking the other man up, and besides --he needs to think about what’s just happened.   
  
The cigarette only has another thirty seconds or so in it before Gabriel crushes it into the glass of the ashtray. He savours the feeling as he stands, and the pleasure walks with him, only getting as far as the the partition before he crosses into the living area of his space. Then, enough distance is between him and Jack and regret comes feeling for him immediately.   
  
This isn’t the first time. That’s the worst part.   
  
Never could bear to see Jack in pain, could he? Never could keep his hands to himself, and Jack needs the distraction right now. When he came by earlier he needed intimacy. Needed closeness, for a bit, so the weight of the situation with Jesse didn’t crush him to death. Gabriel knows this won’t mean anything to Jack. That when it stops hurting, he’ll crawl out of those sheets and they’ll go back to being strangers.   
  
It’s a pleasure principle. Jack isn’t going to love him forever, or return the favour. What’s worse is that when those blue eyes aren’t on him, he can see it all clearly, and he hates Jack for how he compartmentalizes his own life. Hates him even more for what he’s putting the kid through. But then he’ll look at Gabriel again, and it begins again. Like it has before. Like it will once more.   
  
He wonders, then, if it gets to Jack too. But the other man is still sleeping. The sheets are dark and thick and they sustain and rub up against him where Gabriel can’t for a minute. The look on his face isn’t haunted, either. It’s somehow neutral, at a time like this.   
  
That much figures. People incapable of guilt usually do have a pretty good time.   
  
He lights another cigarette. He wanders across the room to tidy it up a little. To fix what he can, for now. There’s a plaid shirt on the floor by the table. The one Jack had arrived in. He folds it up and puts it on the loveseat absently. He clears the table of the glasses that are there. The decanter remains where it is, the salient decoration on the table.   
  
There’s not much to do, to be honest. Then he finds himself standing in the middle of the room, trying to find a distraction to busy himself with. If he doesn’t, he’ll start to think again. He’ll start to realize the mistake he’s made.   
  
Anger is distant to him. That’ll come later.   
  
For now, he just looks back over to the bed. Jack is on his side. His lips are parted slightly. There’s a bite mark on his neck and it has Gabriel’s hands curling into fists at his sides, aching to touch and never quite daring to, his insides light at the suggestion of it.   
  
The knock at the door almost doesn’t register to him, it’s so meek.   
  
Three short raps. He turns on the third, picking up the shirt from the back of the loveseat that he’d been wearing before and righting himself. He hopes to God that it isn’t Ana. He knows what she’d say.   
  
(He knows she’d be right.)   
  
Even if he doesn’t want to hear it, he goes towards the door anyway, reaching it and looking over his shoulder in a shy motion. Jack isn’t immediately visible --a small blessing. He doesn’t need what’s transpired to be known to any more people than need be. He turns back to the door. He opens it very slightly, so that only his face is visible.   
  
Not Ana.   
  
Out in the hall, looking very small and childlike, is Jesse. Of course it’s Jesse. Who else would satisfy the cosmic irony of the situation?   
  
Instinctively, Gabriel draws the door so it’s even more closed. He clears his throat to sound impatient.   
  
“What d’you want, kid?” He forces the cruel tone. God knows right now he’d like nothing more than to give the kid some mercy. To try to protect him, even if the damage is already done. But he can’t, and Jack is already inside, so he goes on to say, “C’mon, it’s late.”   
  
“Couldn’t sleep.” Jesse murmurs, tiredly. “I’m gettin’ the worst headaches.” That’s to be expected. Everyone says that after the procedure.   
  
“You got the wrong door.” Gabriel tells him. “I got nothing for you. Infirmary’s that way.” He hates himself for gesturing down the hall. Hates himself more for the gently bewildered sort of look Jesse gives him. Lost and helpless. Jack isn’t even losing any sleep over it.   
  
The kid doesn’t even depart though. He shakes his head instead. “I know. I’m --I jus’ aint feelin’ so bright.” Jesse shrugs, “Figured we could jus’ talk, or--”   
  
It’s so tragic. So pitiful. Jesse looks so alone, anchoring himself to one of the only friends he has left. And Gabe can’t do a damn thing for him.   
  
“We’re talking.” He says, through his teeth. It’s painful to say. “Riveting as this has been, I got things to do tomorrow. Get some rest.”   
  
He tries to close the door. To try to shorten the already-painful encounter. But Jesse gets his foot between it as it closes, crying out in a short noise of pain, using his hands to keep it open. It startles all three of them --Jesse, who’s looking up with wild, hurt eyes. Gabe, with his hand on the door, feeling like the lowest type of scum. Even Jack, twisting in the sheets, woken by the commotion.   
  
Gabe turns his head to see the other man sit up, pale in the sea of dark sheets, looking at him with the same expression as an animal realising they’ve been caught in a snare.   
  
Jesse is still scratching at the door. Gabe pushes harder.   
  
“Boss, please.” Jesse whimpers. “You’re --you’re hurtin’ me--”   
  
“Then get your foot out of the damn door!” Gabe hears himself shout, then. It’s not Jesse he’s angry at. If anybody, it’s Jack, but he doesn’t get a chance to dwell on it. Because then the door is coming open on his side and Jesse is stronger than he remembers, and at the risk of the kid finding Jack there, Gabe shoves the kid hard as he can through the door, slamming it shut behind him, and isolating them in the hall.   
  
Jesse is breathless against the other wall. His face is red. His eyes are shining with grief.   
  
To see him like that is even worse. Gabe comes forward again before he can help it. His hand goes for the kid’s shoulder protectively, and Jesse recoils furiously.   
  
“Get your fuckin’ hands offa me.” He hisses.   
  
Gabriel lets go immediately. “I’m sorry.” He says.   
  
“Yeah.” The kid sniffs loudly. He spits on the hall floor. “Yeah, you oughta be.” The kid is sort of crying, too, passively. Gabe’s hands tense by his sides, fighting the urge to give the kid a hug or --or something. But it would only confuse him more, so he does nothing. He never does. Just lets the situation be.   
  
Eventually, Jesse sniffs again, and mutters, “What d’ja do that for, anyhow?” his eyes have an anger in them. “I only wanted--...” the thought never gets finished. Jesse trails off and looks like he might cry in earnest for a minute, before composing himself.   
  
“Look,” Gabe says, then, sounding purposefully gentler. “You need to get some rest. You're a mess.”  
  
That doesn't appease the kid any. “Hey--” Jesse scowls.  
  
“Shut up.” Gabe pinches the bridge of his nose. “Just --the best thing you can do right now is sleep. Get a downer if you need to. You can tell them I sent you.” His hands are still tensed. He wishes he could invite Jesse in, and sit him down and give him a drink or somebody to talk to --anything at all, really. He shouldn’t have to go through this loss alone --even if he doesn’t remember what he’s lost or how he lost it.   
  
That’s the most insidious part of it all: Jesse doesn’t know why his head aches. Why it all feel wrong. Why he keeps getting the most uncanny deja vu at the blandest of times. Part of him wonders then if Jesse can smell Jack on his skin. That’s all Gabe of conscious of. The scent of sex is like slander all over him.   
  
But things have been set in motion, and all Gabe can do is offer the kid a rough hand on the shoulder. “I’ll clear your day for tomorrow. Sleep this off, and we can talk then.”   
  
Jesse looks left, down the hall where he’ll be dragging his sorry form to bang on the Infirmary door. A downer looks like the only thing that’s going to put him out. “Feel like I won’t even las’ the night.” He mutters. Were it any other night, and any other agent, and the thought of a free day to sleep in or relax would be cause for a celebration.   
  
“I’m sorry.” Gabe hears himself say, again, more out of instinct than anything else. They’re all sorry. The whole damn situation is sorry. “You just --you can’t be here right now.”   
  
Jesse blinks. His eyes look heavy and wet when he looks at Gabe.   
  
“That’s an order.” Gabe cuts the silence with a strong tone. He pulls the command, somehow, and loathes how Jesse flinches to hear it. How he resigns himself to it.   
  
The kid sniffs again. “Awright, boss.” He nods. “I’m --I’m gettin’.”   
  
Jesse composes himself. He swallows. He doesn’t look back at Gabe when he starts off down the hall, shuffling like a man much older, one hand drawn in to hold his body. The other holding his head. Gabe looks at the back of it --the way his brown hair hangs, and wishes he could run and jump around in Jesse’s mind just for a minute.   
  
Does he know? Do any parts of him remember?   
  
When he’s gone, Gabe slumps against the door and covers his face. He suffers it for only a second before he goes back inside.   
  
Jack is faring no better.   
  
\-   
  
“Are you alright?”   
  
Miss Ana’s voice startles him.   
  
God knows he’d been a million miles away.   
  
Jesse lifts his chin from his palm absently as he comes out of his little reverie, taking stock of the room he’s still in as Ana comes around to sit across from him. Steam rises from her cup. It smells safe and familiar. Jesse never even drinks the tea Ana makes him --could never substitute it for coffee, but he’ll happy sit there and breathe it in.   
  
“M’fine.” Jesse tells her, with an airy sort of voice. “Jus’ distracted, that’s all.”   
  
He notes the smell of home as she stirs the cup absently, and smiles coyly at him. “Something on your mind?” She asks him. Her voice sounds innocuous enough until she adds, “Or someone?”   
  
Jesse’s quick to recoil from that. His nose wrinkles. “Don’t you start.”   
  
That much makes Ana laugh, at least. She hasn’t done this to embarrass him. There’s no real cruelty in her for that. That’s probably why she’s saved the accusation now that they’re alone in the office, breaking for tea.   
  
“I’m not starting anything.” She smiles again. “Merely continuing your train of thought.”   
  
Jesse doesn’t blush. He’s not a child --but he feels his head dip as he shifts, a little uncomfortable. “I wasn’t thinkin’ about nothin’.” He says, “And I’ll thank you not to keep bringin’ it up.”   
  
Ana leans forward. Her chin is in her hand. She grins. “Bringing what up?” Jesse scowls at that, and it makes her laugh again before she settles it with a sip of tea. “Is it something with long eyelashes? And broad shoulders--”   
  
“Awright, awright.” Jesse waves a hand. His face feels hot and his thoughts are weightless and childish like the helium in a balloon. It seems plausible enough to him in his head, and privately, to himself, he examines all the looks that the Strike Commander has given him over the last week, and how he asks about things and remember Jesse’s name. They mean something in his head, but when Miss Ana says it aloud, he realises how ridiculous it sounds.   
  
It’s all Reyes’ fault, really. The bossman had conned him into a week playing desk jockey for the Strike Commander to help sort out his security detail for an upcoming goodwill trip. Jesse isn’t even going with them, either, and he thinks that maybe Reyes did this on purpose. As a way to either help Jesse grow out of his schoolboy crush by working a thankless job for the Commander, or by putting them in a close proximity to make him suffer.   
  
Whatever his intention was, Miss Ana is enjoying it thoroughly.   
  
She’s still smiling as Jesse realises he’s fallen into silence again, and she sighs dramatically, “ _Ah, me_ . Young love.”   
  
If anything, that makes Jesse balk. “Quit it.” He says, seriously. “It ain’t funny. I --I know it’s stupid--”   
  
That changes something in Ana, then. Her smiles sort of fades and she looks at him like she’s sad to see him talk tha way. Like there’s a seriousness in his voice she didn’t see before. “Oh, habibi.” She shakes her head. “I don’t think it’s stupid.”   
  
“I do,” Jesse doesn’t say it defensively --it’s with this small, self-deprecating smile. “I thought I woulda grown outta this by now.”   
  
That makes Ana’s smile return. “You take your feelings too seriously.” She tells him. “I think everyone falls in love with Jack a bit from time to time. He’s --he’s like that.”   
  
“Like what?” Jesse has his own words for Jack. Probably a million, even if he never has it in him to call the Commander by his first name. The question seems to give Ana pauses. She takes another sip of tea. She considers her words.   
  
“He’s preoccupied.” She says, almost wistfully. “When you have his attention, it’s --the sun shines on you, and it’s wonderful.” Her mouth draws to a line as she hesitates. “But then he moves on to something else and suddenly it’s cold.”   
  
The words don’t sound much like hers, but they surely ring true. Jesse makes it though these desk days on the minute or two that the Strike Commander comes by to ask how things are, and if everything is okay, or if he has any questions. Even those meanialities are arresting enough.   
  
“That’s one way of puttin’ it.” Jesse concedes.   
  
Miss Ana shrugs. “That’s how Gabriel says it, anyway.” She stirs her tea and looks generally at peace. “I think people are drawn to him because he makes them feel singular. As long as you have his attention, you feel like you’re the only person in the world.”   
  
Jesse thinks about every conversation he’s ever had with Jack. How the context is a blur, and how he can never remember the other people in the room but somehow always recalls every microexpression across the other man’s face.   
  
“I never met anybody like him, that’s for sure.” Jesse murmurs. He thinks about the last time he saw the Strike Commander, his face drawn and handsome with concentration behind his desk --or the time before, when Jesse had walked in on him sparring with the bossman and he was so quick and powerful. “I thought he was made up, y’know.”   
  
The non-sequitur makes Ana laugh. It halts her from taking another sip, and she puts her cup back in it’s saucer, clearly intrigued. “How do you mean?”   
  
Jesse shrugs. “I was --was jus’ a kid when I heard about him on the news and saw the posters and all. I figured it was just like a character.” He traces an indistinguishable shape on the wood of the table with his finger. “I’m still sorta starstruck, y’know?”   
  
They’re both silent for a few second then, and the sentiment of it sits between them. Ana doesn’t even go to take another drink. She just shakes her head fondly. “You’ve got it bad.”   
  
Jesse waves a dismissive hand. His shoulders rise up self-consciously. “Knock that kinda talk off.” He mumbles, shyly. “You ain’t s’posed to me encouragin’ me.”   
  
“I can’t help it!” Ana laughs. Her face is the picture of innocence. “I think it’s sweet.”   
  
That, of all words, strikes Jesse as ridiculous. “It ain’t hardly sweet.” He says, grumpily. “Jesus, I’d say it’s more tragic than anythin’ else. S’pecially since now I gotta talk to him and _work_ with him an’ all--...” He drops his head uselessly. “I’m goin’ outta my head about it all.”   
  
Ana cants her head slightly. “So tell him.”   
  
And that is the most hilarious thing of all. Or --it would be, if the only real joke in the situation wasn’t already Jesse. He throws his head back to let out a sharp, sour laugh.   
  
“Oh, sure, I’ll jus’ walk right up to him and say ‘hey, mister strike commander, I know you got a long history with Reyes and all and that you’re twenty years my senior but why don’t we have ourselves a little get-together’?” He shakes his head. “Somehow I don’t think he’s gonna go for it.”   
  
It’s said with a sort of bitterness. A genuine sense of loss like Jesse has already been shot down when he can barely get his mouth open around Jack. he sees blue --blue eyes and the blue coat and his tongue snaps back into his skull like a barbed wire snare. Ana doesn’t understand the fear. She can’t marry the image of Jesse on the range: this unstoppable, tenacious force with the shy, overly-auspicious man across the desk.   
  
“There are better ways to say it.” She concedes, gently. “But I can’t stand to watch you suffer in silence for much longer.”   
  
Jesse shrugs again. He chews absently on the corner of his fingernail. “I can’t hardly get hello out around him.” He sighs. “Even if I could--...it jus’ ain’t done that way, y’know?”   
  
It’s like she doesn’t fully hear him. “Don’t be such a fatalist.” Ana chides him. Jesse runs an irritated hand through his hair.   
  
“That’s the last thing I’m bein’!” He huffs. “Y’don’t think I ain’t been through it in my head again and again every time I gotta talk to him? Jesus, I wanted to say somethin’ the moment I met him.” The passion leaves his voice, then, and he shrugs one shoulder because it’s all he can really do. “It ain’t fatalism when I thought it all out as much as I have. It’s -it jus’ wouldn’t work.”   
  
He drops his head to scrub his face with a hand, feeling the skin there warm like he’s threatening to be embarrassed --ostensibly, about some schoolboy crush that’s getting out of hand. It’s all the bossman’s fault. Jesse wouldn’t hardly have to think about Jack Morrison and his high cheeks and his strong jaw and the way his waist tapers just right--   
  
“What wouldn’t work?”   
  
Jesse shoots up his he’s been electrocuted the moment he hears Jack’s voice. He turns, and sees Jack in the door to Ana’s office, coat in hand, exposing his dark, neutral undershirt. His hair is mussed in an accidental and charming way, and Jesse could get stuck on the hairpin curve of his lips if he wasn’t so worried about what his commanding officer might have just overheard.   
  
Of course, Jesse doesn’t get to even speak before Miss Ana interjects in a smug tone.   
  
“Jesse’s love life.” She takes a long sip of tea immediately afterwards to hide her smile, and Jesse hardly knows what to say as Jack steps inside, caught between denying it and concessional silence.   
  
Jack doesn’t seem phased. “I didn’t know he had one.” He says, absently, as he crosses past Jesse, smelling faintly of sandalwood. Then, when he realises what he’s said, Jack laughs. “I mean, I didn’t realise you were involved with, uh --anybody--”   
  
“I’m not.” Jesse says, just as awkwardly, before letting out a short cough. “I’m jus’ entertainin’ a few notions. That’s all.” He looks up at Jack to try to gauge a reaction, but the other man’s face looks almost unreadable. Trained into neutrality.   
  
He tries his best not to look at Jack’s mouth because then if he’s asked anything, all he’ll be able to conjure up is ‘ _you have a pretty mouth_ ’.   
  
Still, Jack nods shortly, and says, “It’s really none of my business.” It sounds a bit clipped, but Jesse hasn’t been working with the other man long enough to really tell if that’s just his imagination or not. “Did you get the inventory outlined?”   
  
Ana takes that one for him. “It should be on the database already.” That seems to genuinely ease Jack a bit, and then a look of slight distress comes over his face. His fingers unclench and clench like he’s nervous about something.   
  
“That’s great.” He says, absently. “You’re definitely efficient.” He’s talking to Jesse then. Not fully looking at him, though. “At this rate, I won’t even need you for the rest of the week.”   
  
He lingers there, for a second. Then he’s crossing to the door and he’s barely been here a minute and Jesse would be content just to watch the man work. But there’s always something that needs doing. Maybe Ana was right when she said it --preoccupied. Maybe it’s best Jesse just finishes his work here as fast and best he can so he can stop indulging the little infatuation.   
  
Jack stops by the door then and nods like he’s forgotten something. “If you manage to finish the report outline tomorrow, you’ll have done everything Reyes sent you here to do.” His voice is impossible to get any clues from. It can’t be said if he’s impressed or annoyed. “After that, I guess you can take Friday off. I’ll have no reason to keep you here.”   
  
Jesse looks at him. Looks at his pretty mouth and wonders how slowly he can finish the rest of the work without his intentions seeming obvious and desperate. He wonders if he shouldn’t just power through it now and spare himself the pining.   
  
Ana takes another sip of tea.   
  
“I’m sure we can think of something for Jesse to do.” She says.   
  
\-   
  
Jesse twiddles his thumbs in the empty corridor.   
  
It’s not like Jack to be so late.   
  
He almost always arrives to greet Jesse at six past the hour, coming straight from a harrowing weekly PR session. It’s always like clockwork. He arrives, breathless from the day but with joy in his eyes, and he opens his private quarters up to Jesse for a few precious hours. Every week, Jack leads the way inside and goes to put on some popcorn. Jesse picks the film.   
  
It isn’t like him to be late, and after a few minutes, he gets a buzz from Jack that says, ‘start without me’ and figures there’s probably a good reason. He uses a temporary override code and Jack’s door and then he steps inside --alone, for the first time in Jack’s most intimate space.   
  
Jesse’s seen it before. Seeing it alone is --different, to say the least. Usually Jack lets him in and tells him to pick the film and that’s that. He doesn’t get a look round. He doesn’t get to satisfy his curiosities about the place. Somebody’s place says a lot about them. He wonders what Jack hoards and what he doesn’t. What food he keeps in his kitchenette. Who he keeps pictures of.   
  
The lights come on automatically as he comes inside. The room is well-decorated but minimal, almost as if Jack has never bothered to put down roots. Reyes’ room has the same floorplan, but is so much more distinct in its personality. He has a few pieces of art, and some decorative sculptures. Just lots of --things, really. Trinkets of sentimentality.   
  
By comparison, Jack’s room looks sort of bare. His loveseat is plain and brown, with cushions that bear no pattern. He has a few purple cornflowers in a little glass on his coffee table. A still-open holozine of National Geographic, talking about the reintroduction of some new species in south-east Indonesia. But that’s it, really, in his communal space.   
  
Jack isn’t here, though. There’s nothing to stop him from looking around.   
  
Jesse passes the living area of the room. He’s spent enough time there to know it. Behind it is a standing screen that hides the sleeping area. Reyes doesn’t have one. His bed is visible from the door. Maybe Jack is just a bit more private.   
  
Stepping around it, he spots the bed. It’s only then Jesse starts to feel like an intruder. This is the place Jack sleeps. Jesse can’t picture it. His touches the corner of the duvet sheepishly --standard issue white. He thinks that Reyes has a pattern on his, at least.   
  
Beside the pillows, there’s a nightstand with a holographic clock on it, floating above an enormous stack of paper. Next to the clock there’s a half-empty glass of water --or half-full, really, and a photograph in a frame. The LED obscures it, and Jesse has to pick it up and bring it closer to get a better look. It’s an old photo. He can tell that from the slight yellowing and the resolution. It features a couple, and Jesse assumes they’re his parents.   
  
That really knocks him out. It seems so unreasonable that a man like Jack could come from any two other humans, modest as they look. He can see the shape of Jack’s nose in the man. The blue of his eyes in the woman.   
  
It feels cheap to look for too long. If Jack wanted to share this sort of stuff, he’d have shared it. Ever the interloper, Jesse goes to place it back, carefully, when he notices there is something hiding underneath where it had been standing. With his other hand, he picks up a shiny, plain piece of paper, and turns it around.   
  
Pictured is Jack. And Reyes.   
  
Must have been long before Jesse came on the scene. They look younger. Both of them are wearing blue, but that’s not what gets his attention.   
  
It’s the fact that Reyes is turned towards Jack in the picture. The fact that they’re kissing.   
  
Jesse puts it down quickly, dropping it like it burns him to touch. God, he should have known better than to do this. He puts the frame back on top of it and tries to make it seem like he’s never been here, but the thought is heavy on his shoulders and he tracks back to the sofa. He tries to think of anything else --literally anything: what might be keeping Jack or what film they should watch but instead all he can think about it Reyes.   
  
In his mind, he’s already going back through every encounter he’s seen the two have, and this time when he thinks about them --really thinks about them, they take on a new weight. The subtext suddenly appears to him now. What once looked like Reyes being cold occurs to him as being arms-length. Jack’s geniality towards him seems apologetic. What did they do to each other?   
  
It’s nearly half past as he comes back to the sofa and realises it will look very strange indeed if Jack comes upon the scene to find Jesse just sitting there and looking dazed. He feels himself removed from the whole situation as he pulls up a screen to select something to watch. Without Jack here, he settles on an old favourite, hoping it will pull him out of the strange mood.   
  
It’s almost an hour later that the door opens again, and Jack staggers in from the hall. By then, the room is entirely dark save for the light of the screen, and the white-hot strip of light from the hall that follows Jack inside startles Jesse more than the noise. His eyes have trouble focusing in Jack given the contrast, but he can see hot, tight enger in the bend of Jack’s elbows and the way he’s marching towards the loveseat.   
  
Jack carelessly tosses his coat over the back of the chair and practically collapses into it, next to Jesse. He doesn’t say anything, either. Just covers his eyes with his hands and scrubs like he’s trying to wash his face away.   
  
Cautiously, Jesse pauses the movie. He moves up to give Jack more room -deliriously wondering is Jack can already sense the invasion of privacy.   
  
After a moment, he murmurs, “Jack?”   
  
From behind his hands, Jack sighs. “I’m sorry I’m late.” He says, “We --we overran.”   
  
Jesse doesn’t know where to put his hands. One look at Jack and he wants to touch. God, he should just sit on them and be done with it. In place of contact, he asks, “Everythin’ okay?”   
  
“Sure.” Jack says, far too quickly.That’s the giveaway. It comes out of him like a gun going off --automatic, accidental. And then Jack drops his hands and his face is pale and pained and he looks older than Jesse has ever seen him look in the light of the film. “What am I saying? Nothing’s okay. This is an unmitigated fucking disaster.”   
  
The way he looks when he says it, too --helpless and adrift. It’s like nothing Jesse has ever seen on him before. There’s nothing of the posters on his face as he sits there, shaking his head sadly. Jesse feels his hands twitch. He knows there’s nothing he can do or say to make better a situation so astronomically important that he can hardly pretend to sympathise. Heavy is the head that bears the crown, he guesses.   
  
After a few seconds, he manages to ask, “Y’want me t’go?” Jesse hooks a thumb towards the door. “I understand if y’want to be alone right now.”   
  
Jack’s eyes open. He regards Jesse with a weary fondness. “No,” He shakes his head. “No, it’s okay. I made a commitment and--”   
  
“I won’t be hurt none.” Jesse tells him. “You should get some rest or somethin’.”   
  
Jack looks at him, then, with something new in his gaze. Something warm enough that Jesse looks back without any sort of worry. He smiles, faintly. He finds it in him to brush Jack’s upper arm.   
  
“I can’t,” Jack shrugs. “I need to know the moment Reyes is back on base.” His shoulders get tight when he says it: revealing the root of the problem. Jesse thinks of the picture he’d found. He moves his hand, feeling even more confused when Jack mutters bitterly, “That’s going to be a _fun_ conversation.”   
  
Jesse doesn’t want to read too much into it. He hardly knows what to say. “It jus’ seems like you got enough on your plate without me hangin’ around here.” He brushes down his lap and goes to get up.   
  
But a hand on his arm halts him.   
  
“It’s fine,” Jack tells him, still looking at him with that ambiguous, warm look. “I --I want you to say. To be honest, I look forward to this.”   
  
That floors Jesse harder than the picture did. All this time he’d been thinking that the weekly rendezvous was just because Jack wanted to humour him, and he didn’t know how to say no, or he was just trying to establish some kind of rapport with literally anyone under Blackwatch. But to know that he enjoys it --that he not only allows Jesse to be here, of all places, in his private space...but to want him there?   
  
Jesse sits before he can fully begin to process the sentiment. His heart practically peeks out of his eyes when he smiles. “That’s --that’s real nice of you t’say.”   
  
Jack smiles back at him, and they have a moment of just looking. His eyes drop to the blonde’s mouth. They kissed, once before. Up in Alaska, when Jack had been drinking, and they saw the northern lights together. Maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe Jack doesn’t remember it. Or even if he does, he probably hardly thinks about it.   
  
“Let’s keep watching.” Jack says, then, and then all of his attention seems to migrate to the screen. It’s suddenly colder, Jesse notes, but he’ll get by. To be alone with him is sunshine enough.   
  
The film continues to play and Jesse zones out to images of gunfighters and ballads. He thinks about the northern lights again. He thinks about the weight of Jack on the loveseat besides him. How, every so often, he checks his communications, and Jesse gets to see his face illuminated by the neon of the display he uses. Even with some distance between them, the other man feels warm.   
  
Jesse’s nearly asleep by the time the credits start rolling, but what wakes him is the nudge besides him.   
  
“Let’s watch another.” Jack says, in a quiet voice. “I only caught the last half of that.”   
  
The suggestion sounds intimate. Maybe Jack doesn’t want to be alone right now. Hell, Jesse can appreciate that. “It’s gettin’ a late.” He does make a point to say, “Shouldn’t you be gettin’ some rest or somethin’? You must be pretty tired.”   
  
He pointedly doesn’t mention his own schedule. He has to be awake for a new day in a few hours. It seems irrelevant in the moment.   
  
Jack takes a moment. He blinks, illuminated by the words on the screen that drift by as he sighs. “I’m exhausted.” His gaze moves to Jesse. “I think--...I think I’ve been exhausted for a while.”   
  
Jesse watches him sigh again. “But I don’t know when Reyes is going to come in, and I need to--” It’s so typical of the blonde that Jesse laughs before he can help himself, and that shuts Jack right up. “What?”   
  
“Worry about it tomorrow.” jesse grins. He jabs Jack’s arm playfully. “I can watch your comm if y’like. Wake you up at the first sign of trouble.”   
  
There’s that look again. Jack’s mouth opens in concern. “I couldn’t ask you to do that--”   
  
“You ain’t askin’ me t’do anythin’.” Smiling, Jesse chides him. He shifts to offer the blonde his shoulder and the warmth of Jack’s body is enough to make him feel dizzy and self-conscious. “C’mon,” He says, dipping his head to offer his shoulder.   
  
Jack looks at him wearily. He yawns, despite himself.   
  
Eventually, he murmurs, “Alright.” Moving across the loveseat, he leans gently on Jesse, feeling warm and soft and vital. “Maybe for just a little while.” Jesse can hardly process the words. He feels overexposed that the places of contact. “Don’t let me sleep too long.”   
  
“Okay.” Jesse murmurs. He doesn’t really believe it’s happening.   
  
Jack yawns again. “Wake me up in fifteen minutes, okay?” His eyes close. He doesn’t see Jesse nod, but feels it all the same.   
  
“Sure.” He says. “Fifteen minutes.”   
  
The credits roll by quietly. After a few moments, he becomes less conscious of Jack’s breathing until he realises that the older man really is asleep. In the dark, it takes time for his eyes to adjust before he can really make out Jack’s features. For once, at peace. Beautiful and timeless. Jesse watches him contentedly. He feels like the moment exists outside the passage of time.   
  
When fifteen minutes are up, he doesn’t say anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> join me in this downward spiral at jfk-d.tumblr.com


	4. little fictions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i bailed a little on the nsfw because I don't have the time or discretion atm. a reprise will happen, though!  
> this was squeezed in between a very busy schedule. 
> 
> ['learn to be like a soldier']

Jesse can feel the claw against his neck.  
  
His insides shiver violently. A voice that reeks of ozone hisses into his ear.  
  
_“Didn’t you learn anything?”_ _  
_  
Jesse struggles, uselessly, against the grip he’s in. Against the sound of cruel laughter.  
  
_“I’ll save you for last.”_ He hears Reaper whisper to him.  
  
“Y’won’t get th’ chance.”  
  
-  
  
Jack is touching his hand.  
  
“We’re recording.” Jack says. Jesse focuses on the way the words sound. How the characteristic gentleness of the tone is gentler still. How one of Jack's fingers traces up Jesse’s hand, tracing a well-travelled path. How sorry his eyes look. He’s trying to memorise it all. Maybe he can. “Jess?”  
  
Jesse looks at him, then, and Jack’s face looks wrong. Too neutral. There’s no fight in his expression. No fear. God, Jesse’s terrified.  
  
“C’mon, Jess. This is --let’s make this as easy as we can.” His voice is so sympathetic. So warm. His presence is a comforting force even here and now, and maybe nothing has changed since Jesse first saw his face on a poster and fell for the proud quiet look of the man, believing the propaganda. That nothing terribly bad could happen so long as Jack Morrison was around.  
  
“‘D’you want to start?” Jack asks him.  
  
Jesse doesn’t want to do anything. But he nods. He has to.  
  
For the benefit of the recording, he murmurs, “O-okay.” He looks at the manilla folder under Jack’s elbow. The one with his name on it. Where, soon, everything they’ve shared will be stored like some illicit secret. His voice trembles. He sucks in a breath. “I --I’m ready.”  
  
Jack’s nostrils flare to hear it. His mouth is in a hard, grim line, but he keeps it in. Jesse thinks he might be crying already. He doesn’t feel real anymore. Feels like he might just dissolve.  
  
“Start from the beginning.” Jack tells him. His tone is clipped --the only giveaway that this is causing him any pain. “If --if you can.”  
  
“Of us?” Jesse’s voice is ragged. He feels small. Like he’s shrinking and his clothes are these enormous cage bars as he calls out, blood in the meadowlark.  
  
Jack nods. Maybe words are too painful for him in that second. But he recovers. Always does. “Of us.”  
  
It takes Jesse a moment either way. How can he --how can he recall such a thing now? He looks at Jack and tries to save the moment for himself. Tries to devour it as he can keep it inside of him forever --the handsome and tragic lines the light cuts into jack’s face. The touch on his hand. The way he calls him ‘Jess’, like it’s something secret. It’s going to be gone soon.  
  
Absently, he feels a tear cut it’s way down his face. He wipes at it.  
  
“We, uh --We met at that Christmas function. Gabe sneaked me in.” Jesse swallows. “I think I was showin’ off to Miss Ana, an’ you --y’got caught in my rope.” He laughs, then, a tragic sort of noise. “I was convinced you’d be angry, yknow? Or that you’d --I don’t know. Y’were so important and mature. I didn’t even think you’d talk to me.”  
  
Jack writes something down. His movements and small and sharp, essential as the blade of a knife.  
  
“I--...I liked you immediately.” Jesse breathes. It feels childish to say, now. Like a confession come too late. “I thought for the longes’ time that it was all a --a front. That whole persona on the posters. An’ --an’ it weren’t.” He sniffs miserably. “Y’wanted to help so many people. I never saw anybody like you, Jack.”  
  
Across the table, Jack’s pen is still. He looks like a man who can’t go on. But he does.  
  
Maybe Jesse just talks on to spite him. That, if he says the right thing, Jack will call it off. That he won’t take the best thing Jesse’s ever had. That he won’t amputate the parts of Jesse that grew from their union.  
  
So he goes on, somehow. “Y’never came on to me, neither. I --I liked that.” He smiles a watery smile. “I was so tongue-tied around you, yknow? At least --a-at first. I couldn’t hardly get words out when I worked on your security detail with Miss Ana.” He swallows. His mouth tastes like ash. Every part of his body tingles from the kill. “I wanted you to think I was smart.”  
  
“I did.” Jack says, then. The first time he’s spoken in a while. It stills Jesse’s heart almost instantly. “You know I did, Jess.”  
  
He doesn’t want to lose this. He doesn’t want to forget. Jesse moves his hand until he’s holding Jack’s, grasping it for dear life as he feels himself start to get overwhelmed again.  
  
What can he remember without Jack? God, he feels as if they met as children even if it’s impossible. Feels like Jack was there on the first day of his life, when the day broke like an empty page. He already feels smaller --afraid of the world as it overtakes him. He’s conscious of nothing else when he holds Jack’s hand but how much he loves Jack --so deeply and painfully, more than the word could ever contain.  
  
It’s what moves him to speak, breaking a sob right down the middle as he curses, “Oh, Jack.” he whimpers. “How can I do this? I --I can’t do this, I can’t cut you out of--”  
  
And then Jack is coming around the table and taking both of his hands and kissing his jaw and his nose and the tears that fall down his face. Anywhere but his mouth, hushing him softly, whimpering to him, “Jess, please. It’s for the best. It is. You know that, don’t you?”  
  
Jesse wants to cling to Jack and never let go. He wants to fall into the other man’s arms and give it all up. “Y-yeah.” He says, treacherous to himself, ever-obedient. “I know.” Saying it doesn’t make the truth any less of a jagged pill to swallow. Jesse can scarcely believe in it when he’s still trying to hold on to the way Jack strokes his hair softly and whispers to him.  
  
“Please.” Jack begs him. “This is --it’s for us. It’s for the best.”  
  
Anger occurs to Jesse, then. The feeling of betrayal. Then he’s standing. Hands into fists, coughing out angrily, “How --how can y’say that?!” His voice cracks. “After this, t-there won’t be--...” Jack’s proximity defeats all of Jesse’s resistance, his form familiar and comforting even if the sight of his eyes --the lack of pain in his face, destroys other parts of Jesse.  
  
He’s the one who initiates the contact, feeling with his arms, falling into Jack as if he can no longer bear to stand. “M’scared.” He whispers.  
  
Jack’s arms do not come up to hold him. No voice comes to assure him. Perhaps Jack is just holding back because he's scared his resolve will crumble.   
  
What does Jesse have left? “I love you.” He murmurs into Jack’s shoulder. He says it like the thousand other times he has said it, sleeping in rooms with Jack, silently across rooms with hidden smiles and small movements. Said it in this kindness, with every cup of coffee make and every trespass forgiven wordlessly. It is all he can say. A last plea --to be spared of this. “I d-don’t wanna do this no more.”  
  
That’s when Jack finds it in himself to speak, of all times. “We have to.” He breathes, his voice tight and stranger. “To --to protect you. We have to end this.”  
  
Then Jesse is shaking his head, grasping hard on the fabric of Jack’s shirt with a terrified fist. With his artificial one, that will tear through the fabric with his ardency in a matter of seconds.  “I --I can’t d-do this.” He murmurs. “I-I can’t--”  
  
“You can.” Jack says. His voice is so strong and stable for the longest time, but it weakens, trembling when he says, “Please, Jess. For us.” He pulls back to take Jesse’s face with a cold, nervous hand. “Learn to be like a soldier.”  
  
Helplessly, Jesse sobs. “M’ _tryin_ ’.” His head drops again in misery. He holds tightly to Jack, and says again, “B-but I love you.”

This time assurances come, strange as they are, distant without meaning to be. “I know,” Jack breathes. “I know, but I’ve --I have to do this. We have to. To --to keep you safe.”  
  
Another desperate shake of the head, movements sluggish with misery. “I don’t care about that.” Jesse tells him, “I don’t care about none a’ that, I-I can’t jus”--  
  
“You _can_ .” Then Jack sounds certain again. As if this course of tragedy is already set in motion. As if it is all he knows. “You can. C’mon, Jess. What else?”  
  
That’s it, then, he knows. No other recourse to take. No easy way out. God, Jesse would take anything but this. He wants to wake from this nightmare --wants one of those rumoured nuclear warheads to burst through the ceiling and in one brilliant, blinding flash of light, let him die knowing who they were.  
  
But nothing happens, nothing at all, so Jesse holds tighter to him. “Remember you --y’bought me that little replica, of the colt bullet?” He blubbers uselessly. “Y’bought it back from Gran Mesa, an’ you gave it to me in --in a little b-box, and y’said, _‘this is for you. For your locker’_ .”  
  
Jack holds him. Sustains him like water, even as Jesse goes on, driving his own stake through the center of his heart.  
  
“I--I knew somethin’ was gonna happen then, y’know? S-somethin’ _wonderful_ \--...”

  
-  
  
The medal ceremony was this morning. Jesse’s never had his picture in any paper before.  
  
At least, not when it wasn’t calling for his arrest.  
  
The day feels like a whirlwind. There are lots of pictures and handshakes. He holds onto his hat nervously. He stays close to Reyes as much as he can. Miss Ana gives him supportive glances, and her gaze reminds him not to say much of anything to anyone.  
  
In the evening, the summit is celebrated something spectacular. A Portuguese jazz band plays bossa nova. Drinks come in a steady supply. They’re given food. Strangers thank him for his contribution to a world he still doesn’t really understand.  
  
He watches in a fascinated silence as most of the others interact. Morrison can’t seem to hardly get a moment of peace. As soon as it looks like he’s escaped the conversation, somebody new is being introduced to him, or striding up to him, or talking to him. A small crowd gathers for him. They look delighted when he speaks. He leads their conversation with a practised ease.  
  
Angela has sequestered some political figure of her own who she’s talking very seriously to. Miss Ana is dancing with Reinhardt. They twirl easily to the sway of the song with a dozen or so others. It looks so peaceful.  
  
Reyes drinks at the table. He talks to nobody in particular. And nobody in particular talks to him.  
  
(At one point, Jesse watches his eyes cross the room to Jack, just as Jack looks nervously over his shoulder.Their eyes connect, just for one intense and uncomfortable second.)  
  
Then Jack is laughing at something someone else has said. Then Reyes is taking another drink.  
  
Jesse hardly knows what to say. Even though he’s sitting at the bossman’s elbow, more or less, he feels caught in the crossfire of the two of them. There’s subtext, he knows, but he doesn’t have enough information to read it. He’s terrified to guess, looking instead at the practised way Reinhardt twirls Ana, radiant as the sun, the fabric of her dress spinning out like a flower blooming suddenly. None of it seems real.  
  
“Ain’t this somethin’?” He hears himself say it more than wills it to come out. Anything to fill the silence that seems to fester like a dark, looming cloud over Reyes. The bossman huffs to hear it.  
  
“Sure is.” he says, coolly --detached from it all. “Wish more of the unit were here to see it.”  
  
Jesse doesn’t know if that’s in reference to those lost, who went under, or the way that blue seems to saturate the scene. He’s the only agent that’s been pulled out of Blackwatch to enjoy this, and there’s something about it that seems so intentionally guileless that it reeks of Morrison.  
  
If he’s the one to put Jesse here, then who is Jesse to argue with divine intervention?  
  
The snare is hissing cooling. Out on the floor, Miss Ana is still twirling, graceful as water, and Jack is still laughing and the saxophone steams across the air like the smell of coffee. Jesse feels his foot tapping absently. He remembers how Reyes had him the unit through their paces by teaching them to ballroom dance --surely a skill any covert agent needed.  
  
Not that he’s ever used it, of course. Now seems opportunity enough.  
  
“Fancy a dance, boss?” He grins from across the table. “See if your lesson stuck or not.”  
  
Reyes makes a short noise like a laugh but there’s no real mirth on his face. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stay put.” He says, blandly. He twirls the ice around in his drink, unimpressed. Maybe he’s seen too many of these functions. It’s not Jesse’s place to ask.  
  
“Suit yerself.” Rising from his seat, he taps the table gently before putting his hat down on it. Apparently, it’s not polite to wear it indoors when it’s a room like this.  
  
He leaves Reyes to his own devices and looks for some company. Initially, he thinks better of interrupting Reinhardt, so he goes for Angela, crossing the floor towards her and passing behind Jack, still swarmed as he is. When he sees Jesse, though, he turns and calls out in a sudden turn of events.  
  
“Jesse,” He smiles, breathlessly, looking around at his congregation. “Please, excuse me.”  
  
And then he’s going towards Jesse --and nobody else, just Jesse, walking him away from the giddy throng as he makes his escape. That’s exactly what it is too, because the moment there’s some distance, Jack’s shoulders drop and his smile fades a little and he lets out a breath like he’s just taken his first cigarette of the day.  
  
It’s arresting. Jesse can hardly get a word out.  
  
Which is fine --Jack does it for him. “I appreciate the rescue.” He says, quietly. “Never thought I’d get out of there alive.”  
  
It’s such a contrast to how he’s appeared mere seconds before, appeasing and charming and at the centre of the universe that Jesse has to laugh. “Not much for your adorin’ public?”  
  
Jack looks over his shoulder hesitantly. “Vultures is more like it.” Then he’s moving his hand to take Jesse’s and he’s paralsyed by the boldness of it. “You don’t mind, do you?”  
  
“Wh--”  
  
“Dancing with me.” Then Jack’s stepping in, with this sort of practised ease, following a lead that Jesse doesn’t have the skills to take. They both dance like they are at the whim of their partner, and he guesses by the way Jack steps gracefully that they had the same teacher. By this point, Jesse is sure he’s hallucinating until Jack says, “If I sit down for a minute they’ll be back. Humour me.”  
  
“Y-yessir.” Jesse murmurs. The more confident of the pair, he steps in and turns them with the movement, looking in a daze over Jack’s shoulder as if to find a pair of eyes that can confirm the reality he’s experiencing.  
  
He hears Jack laugh. The other man is smiling shyly. Candidly. It’s different to how he’s looked in the crowd. More intimate, somehow. “I don’t think there’s any need for formalities at a time like this.” He says, quietly.  
  
“Force a’ habit.” Jesse mumbles. They turn again and he feels the sharp and sudden weight of Jack stepping on his toes. “Hey!” He frowns. Jack just laughs.  
  
“Sorry.” He smiles. He looks up at Jesse. “It’s been a while.”  
  
“Even still.” Jesse says, losing his train of thought momentarily when he looks up and sees Jack looking at him, with those blue, blue eyes, and smiling --just for his benefit. It’s just like Ana says --pure and radiant sunlight, shining on him and only him. Like they’re the only two people left in the room.   
  
They turn again. Jesse sees a flash of blue as Ana twirls behind Jack. She’s looking at Jesse. Not with the knowing smirk he’s expected, but with something else, closer to surprise.  
  
Then Jack purloins his attentions again with another clumsy tread on Jesse’s foot. He’s halfway to a quip about blue suede shoes when Jack says, “Sorry,” again. “What happened to the hat?”  
  
It’s almost like Jesse doesn’t register he’s being spoken to for a few seconds. “Pardon?”  
  
“The hat.” Jack says, patiently, his shoulders swaying naturally to the whisper of the snare. “You’re not wearing it.”  
  
“Oh.” Jesse says. He nods. He laughs, shy of himself, feeling obtuse. “Oh, I jus’ left it with Reyes. It ain’t polite to wear indoors, apparently.” He looks for it, then, but they’re facing the other way, so he can do nothing but joke. “God knows he’s probably set it on fire by now.”  
  
That makes Jack genuinely laugh. “That’d be a shame.” He breathes, fondly. “I like it.”  
  
Then the song is coming to an end, and applause is smattering in the audience and Jack’s sway is coming to a halt. His hands detach themselves from Jesse and he turns towards the band to applaud, too. The absurdity of it all only hits Jesse when Jack isn’t looking at him.

“They’re good, aren’t they?” He hears the older man say, turning before a slim hand is snaking on his wrist and pulling him in another direction.

Who else but Miss Ana, giving Jack this tight but serious smile.

“You don’t mind if I cut in, do you, Jesse?” She asks, in a sweet voice. “I haven’t had the pleasure of having my feet stepped on yet.”

Chided like an older brother, Jack’s nose scrunches a bit as he steps towards Ana. Jesse doesn’t really have a say, here. Even if he did, he knows a bit better than to object and try to keep Jack all to himself. He never has liked making himself too well-known.

The band are starting up again. Jack’s attentions are distant, now, gone in a whirlwind, and Jesse feels almost lost as he stands in the floor, hearing the dark warmth of a double bass bring music back into the room. Adrift, he begins walking back to the table, only to get caught himself. To his great surprise and slight fear, Reyes, standing taller than him, looking tight and imposing in his posture.

Jesse takes a step back out of instinct. “Boss?”

Reyes takes his hands, lovelessly, like they did in the training hall with a dozen other agents. “Move, Jesse.” Comes the order –even though he didn’t know he’s been standing still. Then Jesse’s dancing, again, doing it all backwards with an effortless practise that’d make the boss proud on any other night. A few seconds later, he mutters, “Why do I bother trying to teach any of you anything?”

Jesse realises he’s dragging his feet a little. He picks it up, proudly. “I thought I was doin’ pretty well--”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

That shuts Jesse up good. He swallows, and focuses on his footwork. If nothing else, he can at least give the bossman some semblance of pride. Jesse fancies himself a natural dancer, even if he’s not so good with all of the counting and grace. More natural than Jack, anyway, who is visible over Reyes’ shoulder laughing hopelessly to himself as he moves with Miss Ana. Jesse pities her feet.

He’s getting to wonder what turned Reyes’ mind around about dancing when they turn again and he hears a quiet voice directly in his ear as the hands around his grow ever-so-slightly tighter.

“You get on with the Strike Commander?” He asks Jesse, with an unreadable tone.

Jesse tries to shrug, but it doesn’t translate with his hands busied as they are. He doesn’t want to engage with the question in any capacity. What he settles on is, “Sure. I like him well enough.”

“You liked working with him on that security detail?” It’s still impossible to gleam the implication from Reyes’ tone. If Jesse says no, will he earn himself a lecture on insubordination or disrespect, or is it something darker and more childish as jealousy? Jesse couldn’t say. Wouldn’t dare to, either.

“Sure.” He says, again. “He didn’t make me do no pushups, if that’s what you’re askin’.”  Jesse thinks that will dissolve the tension. That he can emancipate himself from the awkwardness, but he realises after he’s said it that these questions are carefully timed. Jesse can’t well escape without it seeming strange. He’s right where Reyes wants him to be.

“You spend much time with him outside of that?” He’s asked. The question is loaded more dangerously than a gun.

“I wouldn’t say so.” Jesse says, uselessly. “He’s real busy an’ all.”

Jesse doesn’t know if what he’s said is right or not, which is why he gets very hot and nervous, suddenly, when he hears Reyes shake his head and laugh. “Oh my god.” The bossman grins, derisively, even if he looks like he’s distantly in pain.

Jesse can’t stand suspense. “What?”

“Jesus, kid.” Reyes turns them, again. Jack is distantly on the bossman’s shoulder like a vision of an angel. “You’re –you’re thinking about fucking him, aren’t you?”

Doesn’t that just dry up every thought that Jesse’s ever had. He stops moving immediately, spluttering, trying to react in a way that conveys his unbridled shock whilst hiding whatever truth to the statement there is. It does no good when Reyes has been calculating his moves anyway.

He’s laughing again and Jesse sort of wishes he were anyplace else but in front of Reyes, then, unable to hide anything. “You’re seriously thinking about fucking your Strike Commander?”

Jesse’s face feels hot. “Boss--” He pleads.

“Hey, wish granted.” Reyes says, bitterly. “He’s been fucking with both of us for a long time.”

Jesse tries to slip out of his grasp, but no sooner does he step backwards then the bossman come forwards again, with perfect ease and grace, allowing him no escape at all. “Hey.” He says, gruffly, as Jesse stares at the floor in abject discomfort. “Hey, look at me.”

It’s with all the hateful reluctance Jesse can muster when he looks up at Reyes then –the closest thing he’s ever had to a god in his whole life. “What?” he asks, angrily, still feeling the sting of shame.

Reyes takes a breath. “Fraternization is a serious thing.” He says. His voice is different now, bitter in a different way. Devoid of any sort of malice. More regretful than anything. Like he pities Jesse and his ailing heart and his criminal eyes. “You –you don’t shit where you eat, you understand me?”

Without thinking, still hurt, Jesse mutters, “You’d know all about that.”

Reyes doesn’t hit him. He has every right to, and Jesse half-expects a blow that knocks his ass back onto the matt like every other time he’s tried to get wise with the bossman. “I know Ana told you about us.” He says, in a grim voice. “Haven’t you learned anything?”  
  
But Jesse never has to answer --then the song is ending and others in the crowd are applauding. Then Reyes is letting go, stubbornly, looking at Jesse with this warning in his face.  
  
As if to escape it, Jesse says, “It ain’t the same as it was with you.” Certain, for a time. Sure of it, now.  
  
Sure as he is, Reyes just laughs. He turns his heel and laughs to himself in this pitying, miserable way like when he knows a criminal is lying to him.  
  
“Whatever you say, kid.” He murmurs, derisively. “We all got our little fictions.”  
  
-  
  
Eventually, inevitable, Jack wakes.  
  
Fog is heavy in his consciousness. He yawns, despite himself, blinking in the screen light as he feels about for his comm. Jesse’s presence --warm and familiar, is still besides him. Never having left.  
  
“What --what time’s it?”  
  
Jesse comes besides him gently to bring up a display. “Jus’ gone four.” He murmurs.  
  
Four? Jack is nearly off of the sofa in a second, fumbling in the near-darkness as he shakes his head. “I told you to wake me after--”  
  
Unperturbed, jesse says, “Reyes ain’t back yet. His transit’s been re-routed.” he looks down momentarily like he’s embarrassed. “I figured to let y’sleep.”  
  
The softness of the confession: of the way Jesse dips his head and shrugs as if it’s nothing (even if it’s nothing short of true affection) is so arresting that Jack finds himself a little lost, for a second. He doesn’t know if he should sit or stand. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands.  
  
Calmer, now, enjoying the haze of sleepiness, he comes to sit by Jesse again. “Did he contact you?”  
  
Jesse’s head shakes. His hair tousles ever-so-slightly, feathery and boyish. “Not as such.” Leaning forward, he picks jack’s comm off the table and holds it out. “I, uh, jailbroke your comm when the message come through. Didn’t think there was no sense wakin’ you if it was jus’ a routine announcement.”  
  
Somewhere, Jack realises he should be angry as he takes the comm back. God knows he has a backlog of private conversations on there --his contact history with Gabe somehow being the most and least of his worries all at once. But mostly, he’s impressed by Jesse’s proficiency. And by his sensitivity.  
  
After he’s taken it, Jesse runs his hands on his thighs like he’s brushing them down to go. It’s only then Jack realises what else has been done for him. “Don’t you have a simulation in a few hours?”  
  
Jesse shrugs. “Sure do.”  
  
“But you’re still here.” Jack wonders, briefly, if he’s missing something. If there’s another factor that will eliminate the sudden subtext of the situation. “Why haven’t you gone back to your own quarters?”  
  
Again, Jesse shrugs, as if he’s shy of it. “I got a little shut-eye here. Plus y’were asleep on me, and I didn’t think it fair t’wake you.” It hangs between them for a few minutes. Not just what Jesse had said, but what he hasn’t said. Jack imagines him sitting here, in the dark, jailbreaking the comm, sitting peacefully still, all to allow Jack a few hours of rest. It’s more intimate than some of the sex he’s had.  
  
Guilty, then, hating how charming he find’s Jesse’s fox-like, boyish smile in the near-darkness, he murmurs, “Jesse, I--...”  
  
The other man seems to know already. “I --I know. I’m sorry.” Jesse stands like he wants to distance himself from it. His hands wring a little. “I don’t mean t’put you in any situation you ain’t happy in, what with the bossman an’ all.”  
  
Jack had expected defensiveness. Maybe it’s too many years with Gabe around that’s done it, but he didn’t ever dream of hearing an apology. One that’s barely warranted too. If anything he expected accusations. Their weekly rendezvous, and how jack always finds time for the other man when he can. How he’s being selfish and cruel because he hasn’t instigated anything or intended to.  
  
But of all things, Jesse is sorry.  
  
“What?” Jack asks him, stuntedly. “What d’you mean about --about Reyes?”  
  
Jesse seems to take a small step back at that. It’s clear to all of them how Jesse sees Gabe --his god and icon. No wonder he’s avoiding the question. “C’mon, Jack.” he murmurs, awkwardly. “It’s pretty obvious y’got history t’gether. An’ I --I ju’s don’t wanna overstep--”  
  
“History.” Almost amused, Jack echoes him. He cants his head with a sigh. “I won’t lie to you about that.” he says, solemnly. “But that’s all it is, now. History.”  
  
“Oh.” It appears as if it’s news to Jesse. Even in the dark, the surprise registers to his expression, going from deferring to almost intrigued. “So --so you two ain’t--”  
  
“There is no ‘us two’.” he shrugs. “It’s --things ended. We’re colleagues.”  
  
“Jus’ colleagues?”  
  
The speed of the question makes Jack laugh. He nods. Rises himself, on tired legs, and moves closer to the other man. “Just colleagues.”  
  
Jesse’s hands have stopped wringing, and one of his hands has moved to rub the nape of his neck. “So, uh,” He murmurs, “Reyes wouldn’t mind it none if I, uh--...”  
  
Then there are only a few inches between them. Jack feels delirious with confidence, for once. Feels like he could say or do anything and Jesse would move with him, even if the room were off it’s axis.  
  
Unshakably calm, he leans into Jesse and is near-whispering when he smiles, “Well,” He breathes, “I won’t tell him if you don’t.”  
  
And then?  
  
Then they are kissing.  
  
It’s not clear who initiates it. All Jack is conscious of is how beautifully receptive Jesse is. How he tils to deepen the kiss. How his hands find their way to anchor on to the other man, one going to his hip, shyly, and the other finding the confidence to press the small of Jack’s back. Not just touching him but holding him there.  
  
Jesse’s grasp is tight. His hands roam like he wants to explore all of Jack, finding his solid, muscular form under the sheer of the button--up. Jack is of a similar mind himself. One of his arms is sort of trapped between them and he can find no other recourse but to grab onto Jesse’s belt, boldly.  
  
His other hand cards through Jesse’s hair. He barely thinks about breathing until they separate, briefly.  
  
Utterly lost, Jesse looks at him with wild and trepidatious eyes.  
  
When Jack looks squarely back, without an inch of hesitance --with nothing but equal affection, Jesse smiles. He tilts his head. His lips find Jack’s neck as the distance between them dissolves.  
  
God, it’s been time enough that jack feels weakened by the messy, passionate kisses that tracker further around his neck --hissing out in delight as Jesse bites him below the ear and moves to nibble his lobe, exhaling gorgeously.  
  
Jack uses his other hand, then, snaking around Jesse’s tight body to his ass, squeezing with a cruel smile just to feel Jesse jerk against him. His body feels hot and constricting. His clothes even more so.  
  
Jesse is easy against him, moving forward boldly as Jack staggers backwards onto the couch. He barely gets a moment before the other man is upon him again, still grinning in the near-dark as he climbs into Jack’s lap. They kiss again --rougher, this time, with Jesse biting on his bottom lip as he pulls away to take off his shirt.  
  
Jack doesn’t stop him. He encourages it, in fact, slipping a hand under the fabric as it goes up, and feeling how hot and smooth Jesse’s skin is. He wonders how it tastes for all of three seconds before his hesitance crumbles and then he’s mouthing hotly at Jesse’s chest and dragging his tongue down, down, down, tasting the tang of salt and linen and cigarette smoke.  
  
It earns him a shivery sigh from Jesse, who’s hands come for Jack’s hair, this time, guiding his ministrations greedily before pulling him to eye-level again.  
  
“Christ,” He hears Jesse hiss, “Christ, d’you know _how long_ \--”  
  
He hisses in surprise when Jack’s hands go for the belt --a plain clunky affair that opens with a clink. Then he’s working his way on the buttons, feeling the outline of Jesse’s cock, heavy and already half-hard, beneath the fabric. The very suggestion has Jack humming, working his hands quicker as Jesse thrives under his attention, grinding his hips down, never to neglect Jack.  
  
In a second, Jack’s worked his fatigues open enough to have Jesse in hand --warm and every bit as pink as Jesse’s pretty lips or his blush. He’s so rosy and perfectly crafted that Jack can barely help but work over him lovingly, his mouth watering to feel it. He hears no complaints --Jesse goes lax against him, whimpering through his teeth, kissing at and murmuring into Jack’s ear.  
  
But it’s Jack who whispers, “Fuck.”  
  
He’s achingly hard as it is, and as he works over Jesse’s cock in tender movements he wonders what that pretty mouth would feel like, or --or what else. God, he feels like a vapour, lightheaded and delirious. Jack is usually so guarded. So careful in his every move, and the intimacy is so sudden and intense that it thrills him something terrible.  
  
“I want,” he murmurs, working over Jesse’s head delicately, “to taste you.”  
  
Jesse’s hips buck a little like he can’t even control himself at the suggestion. “Jesus, Jack.” He murmurs, hotly, something worse when Jack takes his thighs and shifting Jesse onto his back.  
  
Then Jesse is looking up at him while Jack moves. He smiles in the dark. He feels electric.  
  
He sighs as his mouth opens, taking a few hot inches tentatively, thrumming with anticipation.  
  
And Jesse whines.  
  
-

  
Only the light of the file name illuminates him. ‘n0th3rn-l1ght5’, shedding a trembling light on his indignities.  
  
Otherwise, there he sits in the dark. No talking, this time. Jesse just listens.  
  
It takes less than ten seconds for him to recognise his own voice as the response to Morrison’s. But the recognition --the feeling or recollection and ownership over the words he’s hearing? That never comes. There’s no way of telling when his conversation happened, or why.  
  
Jesse thinks he knows. A suspicion in his mind --a doubt that grows to fear as he listens on. His voice sounds younger. It sounds as if he is crying.  
  
Out in the hall, he can hear echoes. Voices of confusion. Doors opening and closing. Whatever the recording is, it’s being played in every room, for everyone to hear.

He listens on, transfixed.

Even when his brain starts to ache. Even when a trail of blood from his nose surprises him.

He doesn't know what his voice is talking of. The conversation registers to him distantly like the fading details of a dream. The only clarity is the fear --of how his small voices shakes; torn open, daylight visible on the other side of it.  
  
Jesse doesn’t know the fear intimately,, but he recognizes it. The signs are all there --the way morrison calls him ‘Jess’. The way Jesse cries, openly, when in any other context he’d muffle the sounds of agony to spare his pride. It’s worse when he says --most treacherous and pathetic of all, when he hears himself snivel _‘i love you_ ’.  
  
When he hears himself say it to a stranger of a man. The one who left Miss Ana to die, anonymous, nameless, forgotten.  
  
Where did they go from here? What had they done to eachother? What did they go on to do? Jesse can’t tell a thing from the other. His brain burns. He thinks he might die.

 ** _“I--I knew somethin’ was gonna happen then, y’know? S-somethin’ wonderff--”_ _  
__  
_** The words register. The last thing.  
  
And then darkness.


	5. strange mercy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "it's not your fault." 
> 
> hi welcome to chillis   
> (with special love to grant, who makes this work readable)

A foil blanket, but no fanfare. Wrapping Jesse like some surprise.    
  
Jack doesn’t know how anybody could be cold at a time like this. He burns white-hot like magnesium just to stand there. Just to catch a glimpse of Jesse though the observation glass, not yet ready for a reunion, nor much of anything. Against the shock of the reflective blanket, Jesse’s skin looks pallid. His arms look too long --too skinny. Nothing like the arms Jack has woken in so many times.    
  
Then Jesse draws them in to shiver and Jack sees it.   
  
Or, doesn’t see. Where the other arm should be.    
  
He’d been warned, too. Angela had stood trepidatiously in his door with a solid chart in her hand and her face tight and almost blue with that look she gets when she’s trying not to cry. She hadn’t. Neither had Jack. The shock stops anything from coming out of him, in fact.    
  
That will come later.  For now, Jack is stifled.    
  
And it’s not just the arm. Not the cold snow of bandages that bloom gaudy with poppy-red at the base of the stump, nor the purple of the bruises in the midst of other, yellower ones; not even just the marks where other, more ambiguous objects have left nasty indentations. It’s the expression Jesse holds. This thousand-yard stare, like he’s lost in some innocuous thought of a happier time and a happier place.    
  
He barely blinks. He never speaks.    
  
That’s something else Angela had said. She has always philosophied that news is easier to swallow if it’s in its most clinical terms, and she’s said ‘catatonic’ without realising how Jack has been aching to hear of Jesse’s voice. To hear his breath, even --tremulous, ghosting over the distant line of a black telephone if it came to that. To see those eyes, even just for a second.    
  
But the telephone is off at the root. No voice worms through.    
  
Jack would rather him hysterical. Would rather hot tears and accusations or wild, savage fury; than this. God knows that’s where Gabe is, destroyed as he is by the news, scorned by Jack’s silence.    
  
As if Jack doesn’t wish he could unhinge his jaw and scream. As if he doesn't wish to be like Gabe, to let all the ire and tragedy and regret that hides deep in the marrow if his bones be known by them all. But he can’t, and even if he could --then what?    
  
Would he be humble enough for Gabe, then? If he let this destroy him, as he knows it well would?    
  
Jack just watches Jesse, feeling the ache inside of him. The bleeding in spite of his love (now made afraid) has become smothering and oppressive. It is unbearable --but no more unbearable than that glazed, distant look in Jesse’s eyes. Whatever Jack does with his pain --whether he allows this to get under his skin and crack his hull and have him take on water, or if he shoulders it as bravely as he can, it will not change things for Jesse.    
  
So he makes it easy for Jesse. He swallows it.    
  
The truth is a strange sort of poison like that. No matter how much of it Jack keeps inside himself, it seems only to harm those around him.    
  
Inside, Jesse still stares. His shivers are distant and third-person to his own form. They have not yet determined the extent of what had happened to him, but Jack has seen enough in his life that he should have shut his eyes to that he already knows. Maybe the exact details elude him, but it’s all there on Jesse for him to see --the signs of sleep deprivation are in his eyes. The sharp, gasping breaths that indicate waterboarding or even water cure. The burn marks on his upper arm.    
  
And the blunt, sudden stop of the bandage.    
  
Jack wonders if Jesse was conscious when they amputated it. Or --or if he was conscious and strapped down and struggling like a live wire as they sawed through his radius.    
  
Then Jack can’t wonder at all, because he cannot bear to.    
  
“Jack?” From behind him, Angela’s voice trembles in the still air of the hall. The sound is appalling --appalling that Jesse might hear him and see him after all that’s happened. Hesitantly, he turns. Tears his desperate sight away from his love. “You should sleep, Jack.”    
  
At that, he shrugs. “I --I can’t sleep.” He says.    
  
He means: ‘I can’t sleep in that bed --our bed. I can’t bear to hear the silence where his breath should be.’   
  
Angela can probably tell. She comes forward in gentle, modest steps, as if not to alert him, her gaze turning to Jesse. Still catatonic. Jack wishes already that the word would disappear and all that it means. Would that he never had to hear it again, looking through as Angela places a hand on the glass gently as if it will improve her observation.    
  
“He’s going to be okay.” She murmurs, quietly.    
  
“Can I--”   
  
“Not yet.” Her head shakes. She looks away from him. “We don’t know how deep the conditioning goes. Right now our priority is treating his physical injuries.”    
  
Jack looks down. He looks anywhere but at her, or at Jesse. The chart, in the corner of his eye, boasts words that have no meaning to him. He can’t marry the descriptions, or even the name, to the man in the room. Fever, pleurism, sleep deprivation, malnourishment, blunt force trauma, lacerations --jesus, mutilation. That’s not his Jesse Avery, the one who curls around him in bed still wearing his socks and his pants and sometimes his shirt if he’s tired enough.    
  
That thought is so intimate to him --so awful that he can no longer bare to watch, and his hand goes for the door in a single reflexive second.    
  
Angela’s quick, too, hurrying to hold it closed, her visage turning to a hot pink. “Commander, please!” she hisses. “He might well try to kill you!”    
  
“So let him try.” Jack says, thoughtlessly. “I need to --to--”   
  
She fights him on it. Poor, brave girl as Angela always has been --standing up to her Commander without a moment of hesitation. “You need to rest.”    
  
His hand jerks the handle. “Angela, please,” Jack begs her, “He needs--”   
  
“That’s enough.”    
  
Then Ana’s voice is at the end of the hall, suddenly. Steely and cold as a mother, with no room for argument. When had she appeared? How long has she been watching Jack in all of his misery and helplessness, unable to do anything at all with all of the affection and anger that festers in his bone marrow?    
  
Just the sight of her defeats him, silvering, sailing towards him. His immovable nature creates a space for her unstoppable force. He lets go of the doorhandle. Under Ana’s eye and her horus mark, he feels ungainly and vulnerable. Feels like he might start crying.    
  
He doesn’t, of course. He can’t. Couldn’t dissolve like this for Jesse’s sake or for Ana’s. So he puts himself together.    
  
(Even though he remembers how Gabe always used to say ‘everything put together falls apart’.)   
  
With a gentle hand on Angela’s upper arm, Ana murmurs, “I’ll take care of this.” Her voice is soft and calm. A presence reassuring. The only solid thing left in Jack’s world of water, where he’s adrift, taking on water --drowning under it all. “Go on.”    
  
Angela nods to the older woman, worriedly --hesitantly, before turning back to Jack with a look that is both impassioned and imploring. “Alright.” She says, gently, withdrawing from Jack slightly. “Get some rest. Both of you.”    
  
Ana keeps them in a tense silence while they listen to Angela’s heels click-clack down the hall.She doesn’t move nor speak until the sound of the door --a sign that they are alone, at last. Then she moves past Jack, towards the one-way observation glass, peering in on a view that Jack can no longer shoulder.    
  
Than Ana’s invincibility falters, even if it’s momentarily. Her form sags. She presses a hand to the glass. “Oh, Jesse.”    
  
Jack cannot stand to hear her pain. He thinks he might well die when Ana’s head shakes. “What did they do to him?” 

“I don't know.” He says, miserably, uselessly; cold-footed swine. “He's--” That word occurs to him again. Catatonic. It feels too separate from Jesse. Like a condition: something that Jesse has gotten, and not something that's gotten Jesse. “He's not talking.” 

Ana turns her head. “And the conditioni--”

“I don't know!” Jack turns, then, unaware of the threat of tears until his sees Ana as a wobbling picture of grief. How can he cry? How can he make this about his pain? His jaw clenches hard, but it's too late to hide from Ana. 

And then she's coming towards him. Then a hand is on his face, forcing the direction of his gaze towards her. 

“Jack,” she says, slowly and deliberately, “This wasn't your fault.”

“Don’t.” The word forces it's way out. He is desperate not to cry, now. “How can you say that?!”

Ana takes a step back. To give him some air. “Listen to me.” 

But he won't. He can’t. 

“No.” He shakes his head furiously. “No, you --you listen to  _ me _ !” One of his hands raises to point to the glass, a view he himself can no longer stand. “I did that to him.  _ Me _ . If I wasn't--if we weren't--” The threat of tears again. His voice breaks pitifully swallowing it before he tries to get more of it out. “--we both --we all know it, Ana, you can’t--...”    
  


Her hand comes back up to his face, almost as if to silence him this time. Her eyes glisten, too, sparkling like diamonds on the ocean floor, her own head shaking. “Jack,” She murmurs, in a weak voice, “Jack, listen to me. It’s not your fault.”    
  
He resists her, angrily. “Stop it.” His voice is ragged. He looks down furiously at her feet.    
  
But she doesn’t.    
  
“You didn’t know.” She says. “You couldn’t’ve. There was a breach.” At his head shaking, her hand clamps his shoulder as if to anchor him to what she’s trying to say. “Jack, it’s not your fault--”   
  
“Don’t!” Then the threat overcomes him, and Jack is so momentarily overwhelmed that he forces her away --a single, hard shove as a tear breaks free down his face treacherously. Ana staggers backwards. Jack wipes at his face furiously. “Don’t fuck me with me.” He hisses at her. “Not --not you. Not now.”    
  
A crack in the stone wall. Composure gone. Ana doesn’t seem to take it as a bad sign. She rights herself and come forward once more without any hesitation. “Look at me.” She says.    
  
Jack looks anywhere but her --until her voice grows harder. “Look at me, Jack.”    
  
So he does. For once, allows himself to be known, tears free on his face, now. Nothing left to hide behind. All of this while Jesse sits there, motionless, catatonic, staring off. He feels sick, and hot, and ashamed of every fibre of his body.    
  
Ana sees all of this. Looks at him fully, and says, “Jack, none of this is your fault.” She lifts her arms up and pulls his head into her shoulder gently. “You didn’t cause this. You did everything right.”    
  
Jack isn’t even conscious of his own anguish. The tears feel secondary --belonging to someone else. With his head buried in her shoulder, and his spirit hiding in her sleeve, Jack can hardly find his voice. “Jesse--”    
  
“He’s alive.” Ana soothes him. She strokes his back in long movements like she’s trying to calm a wild animal. “He’s going to be okay. And it’s not your fault. It isn’t. You did all you could.”    
  
The rest of him dissolves. He can hardly hold on to the sensation of it as he falls apart, his weight shifting onto the smaller woman, his sobs become near-hysterical. There is no more he can swallow. There’s nothing more he can bear to hide. Just for a moment, he needs to suffer it. To expose all of his fearful, terrible, wonderful love to the open air.    
  
Ana lets him. She holds him there, and tells him, again and again and again, “You did all you could, Jack. You can’t blame yourself. You can’t.”    
  
But he does, and he will. 

  
(He remembers, distantly, as he eventually tracks down half-known corridors to his bed, that Gabe used to say ‘even if you’ve done something right, you can still lose’.)   
  
-   
  
  
They’re still building his legs.    
  
And if Jesse’s ever pitied any other sorry sonofabitch, he’s pitied the one who is still mostly in pieces, sat up in the bed that keeps him. It’s the one who’s looking down at where his lap should be vacantly while the synthetic black of his bottom jaw works. He’s considering.    
  
Then with a strange sort of delicacy, the metal fingers of Genji’s left hand pick at a card and he lays it in the pile with hesitance. King of diamonds. Silence.    
  
Jesse takes a card from the top of the spare pile, face-down, and holds it out towards Genji. The idea of metal on metal makes him uncomfortable. He thought he’d be more used to this by now.    
  
“Y’didn’t say  _ ‘it’s good t’be king’ _ .” He says, easy with smugness. Genji is considerably less pleased to take the card, letting out a short, airless huff. It’s not the first card Jesse’s issued on account of the rules --the one’s you’re not allowed to explain. It’s a strange game.    
  
“ _ Kuso. _ ” Genji shakes his head, but there’s a suggestion of a smile on his face. It’s difficult to tell, really, due to the extent of the injuries. There’s a part of his top lip missing, near the corner of his mouth, that exposes some of his artificial teeth, making Genji look like he’s almost sort of sneering. It’s a terrible suggestion, given that he isn’t the type at all to sneer. Placing the card in his hand, Genji mutters, “This game --there are too many rules.”    
  
Jesse laughs. “That’s the idea.” He says, shifting where he’s sat on the bed. It’s not very comfortable, but Genji probably won’t notice. “I’m waitin’.”    
  
A shake of the head --but Genji is smarter than to be proud during a card game of any sort against an opponent like Jesse. So he musters the phrase, clumsily. “It is good to be a king.” It more than serves.    
  
“There y’go.” Jesse says, perusing his own hand, and taking the King of Spades to lay. The sound of his metal fingers on card is louder. He feels hyperaware of it, even if he can’t feel it anymore. Maybe the thought lingers on his face --Genji always recognises that type of loss, even if he never has to use words to show it. “King a’ Spades.” Jesse says, after a second of hesitation. “It’s  _ very _ good t’be king.”    
  
He leans forward and knocks on the surface of the table besides Genji, who watches him with a sort of bemused startlement. Genji doesn’t know about the other rules yet --knocking for spades and announcing the value, or adding an intensifier if the same value is laid more than once. But he’ll pick it up.    
  
Then Jesse is sat back in his place again, adjusting the order of his cards, and looking at Genji expectantly.    
  
“What did you--”   
  
“Time off.” Jesse says, quickly. “Time off.”    
  
This only serves to frustrate Genji even more, who folds his hand in his lap and says, “ _ What _ are you talking about?”    
  
Jesse smiles again, but it’s milder. The seed of discomfort --his awareness of what he no longer has digs into however his mood is like a thorn in his foot. Would that it were so mild. So easy to fix. Coughing, trying to shake the feeling off, Jesse folds his own hand down and says, “Remember what I told you --about havin’ two states a’ play?”    
  
Genji looks vacant, still. Doesn’t like losing or learning. No love lost there, to be fair.    
  
“Well,” Jesse sighs, leaning back on his good arm and feeling comfort in the sensation of the fabric beneath his palm.    
  
“There’s  _ time on  _ an’  _ time off _ . When it’s time on, y’play, you ain’t supposed to talk, but y’can look.”    
  
Finishing for him --astute, at least, Genji says, “Suggesting that you cannot look at your cards during ‘ _ time off’ _ ?”    
  
That sets his smile for sure, and Jesse nods eagerly. “Now you’re gettin’ it.” He says, earnestly. But Genji doesn’t share his enthusiasm all that much. He looks dejected and practically sulky.    
  
“Let’s play something else.” He says, a bit distantly. “I’m bored.”    
  
It’s occurred to Jesse before that maybe before all this Genji didn’t know what it was like to lose anything. Not his pride or games or anything like that. Now he’s fraught with loss --stuck there in this bed while they work on legs on which he can stand, for Christ’s sake. Maybe he’s spoilt. Jesse can excuse that.    
  
“I’m jus’ trainin’ ya up.” He says, gently, not pressing one way or another. “It’s the Blackwatch game a’ choice, an’ if you’re as lousy as I was when I first joined, you’re gonna lose an awful lotta money.”    
  
Without hesitation, Genji sighs. “I have none to lose.” He smiles a bitter smile, that exposed bit of teeth no longer looking threatening when the amber eyes above it are so sad. “Nothing to lose, in fact.”    
  
Jesse’s prosthetic feels heavy when he hears that. Like sudden weight attaches to it, and he brings it into his chest almost to check that it’s still there. He knows about loss, too, even if it’s different --even if he doesn’t know how intimate he is with the concept.   
  
“Yeah, well.” He lowers his arm and shrugs. “Nothin’ but your pride, Shimada. Ready for time on?”    
  
Genji’s head lolls back passively. His eyes look heavy and nasty in the way he’s gotten a few times before like there’s a choice sentiment on his tongue about the situation before him. But no sooner does he go to open that sad, funny-looking mouth of his than a voice from the door startled them both.    
  
“You started without me?”    
  
From the door, Fareeha startles them both. Jesse turns to face her. Genji merely looks over his shoulder. She stands, not quite filling the door but having grown considerably in this last year, lean with youth but sharp with muscle and bone. She looks so much like her mother that Jesse can’t even look at her without smiling.    
  
She marches inside with such purpose, arms akimbo, awaiting a response.    
  
Jesse is busy making space for her on the bed. Genji can’t well move. It doesn’t matter. It won’t be forever. “I’m sorry, little miss.” He says, earnestly, patting down a space of bed for her to sit with his good hand. “We were jus’ practisin’ so we could bring our A-game for you.”    
  


Fareeha laughs. She swings her legs playfully from where she sits as Jesse re-deals the cards. It’s a fine scene until Genji interjects wearily. “Could we play something other than ‘Mau’?” He asks, witheringly. “I’m tired of it.” Jesse gives a noncommittal shrug, cutting his eyes sideways to Fareeha, ready to justify her opinion the moment she gives it.    
  
Which she does, promptly. “We could play a hand of blackjack.” She suggests brightly. “And then whoever wins can decide what we play.” It’s so efficient and diplomatic. That’s from the Strike Commander, he supposes, rather than Miss Ana who prefers decision and action. It’s not bullish enough to be the bossman. Probably good, considering it all.    
  
So he re-deals the cards yet again, and Genji watches with a little less hostility in his gaze, and Fareeha swings her legs as she tells him all about her day, and what she’s seen and who she’s spoken to. Jesse watches her as he listens.    
  
(He never notices the feeling of other eyes on him, out in the hall, opportunistically looking in on the makeshift gathering. The way they focus intently on him with a tragedy the scene lacks --a deep longing that doesn’t seem to have a place left in the world.    
  
No, it goes unnoticed, until, quietly, aside, out in the hall, Gabriel’s voice comes from seemingly nowhere, soft as not to be heard, but gruff enough to have hurt of his own in there.     
  
“Jack.” He says, brusquely, lifting a hand as if to comfort the other man, but deciding against it halfway through the gesture. “I’m sure you got something else to be busy with.”    
  
Jack feels himself nod. His mouth is heavy and awkward. It can hardly manage the word ‘yes’, and when he does say it, it’s without tearing his eyes away from the scene. Everything is colourless to him beyond the sight, because then Jesse has heard something funny and he’s making that face Jack always liked and he’s laughing, suddenly, head tipped back, nose scrunched.    
  
“Jack.” Gabe says, again, in a harder voice. “This is just--”   
  
That tears Jack’s attention away. Not because it’s provocative but because the sight of it probably hurts a bit too much. “Don’t  _ you _ have something to be busy with?” It comes out hard and unfeeling. Always does when it’s to Gabe.    
  
The older man opens and shuts his mouth like he’s trying to stop a fitting reply from worming its way out of his mouth. “As a matter of fact, I do.” He says, harshly. Deliberately. His gaze turns towards the room for a second. It pains him for half a second. “You should --you should go.”    
  
Jack could hate him for that. But he feels nothing at the words but resignation. “I know.” He says, emptily, nodding when he remembers to. “Yeah --yeah, I’ll just--...”    
  
“You do that.” Gabe tells him. His voice is neither cruel or kind. It’s a king of instruction, if anything. Jack departs. Hesitantly. With footfalls as heavy as his heart.    
  
And when Gabe enters the room to talk to Genji --none are any the wiser Jack was ever there to begin with.)   
  
-   
  
Jesse whines.    
  
Then his hand comes up to smother his cries in the dark.    
  
Above him, Jack looks insatiable. His hand is still moving, gripping tighter now, working over Jesse’s cock in slow, deliberate motions and to work him fully erect --hot, heavy. Jesus, he can probably feel Jesse’s pulse by now.    
  
“Fuck.” he coughs out, weakly, suddenly unable to look Jack in the eye. A problem Jack isn’t sharing. His eyes don’t leave Jesse’s face as he comes down again to kiss Jesse and bite Jesse’s bottom lip and his neck and send the dual sensations of the pain and the hot, tender twist of his hand on Jesse’s cock right down his spinal column.    
  
Jesse bites into the flesh of his hand once more when a noise threatens to worm it’s way out of him, but Jack takes his wrist swiftly, begging to hear him, wanting to know everything that he does to the younger man. “That’s it.” He says, gruffly, grinning like a predator tingling from the kill. His own cock is a hot, thick line of agony still in his own pants. Jesse doesn’t know how he can stand it.    
  
“H-how long?” Jesse keens, panting his words out as Jack continues to work him until hot and sticky pre-come beads at his tip, spread all over the head of his cock with a few needy motions.    
  
For his part, Jack noses at Jesse’s neck and talks low and brusquely. He is usually so put together, but Jesse knows well enough that things fall apart.    
  
“I wanted to fuck you in Alaska.” Jack murmurs, hotly. “Wanted to see what you tasted like.”    
  
Jesse wants to say something --he wants to tell Jack that he feels the same. That he’s had too many cold showers to count with those sentiments in mind. Want to tell about how often he looks at Jack’s pretty mouth and imagines it being put to all sorts of uses, but when he opens his mouth, Jack squeezes as he drags from the base of Jesse’s cock and then all that can escape is a hiss of delight.    
  
Grinning, Jack murmurs, “You’re wearing too many clothes.”    
  
“S-says you.” Jesse protests, breathlessly, lifting himself up on his elbows to get a better look at Jack and the mess that’s being made of him. Jack’s fingers are sticky and when his hand moves away, strings of precome become visible in the near-dark.    
  
Worse still when Jack put those fingers in his mouth, one at a time, working over each digit dutifully and making a deep noise of pleasure after the first. “Jesus, Jesse.” He breathes. Jesus is right --Jesse thinking he might burst from the pressure in his gut.    
  
Because then Jack is moving to take off his shirt, pulling it over his head and tossing it aside. His smell becomes more obvious immediately --sandalwood, the faint alcohol of aftershave, and a hard, masculine taint to his sweat that makes Jesse just as weak as the sight of his broad, enormous chest.    
  
Without thinking --or remotely undressing himself, Jesse sits himself up and goes straight for one of Jack’s firm pecs, dazed by sheer arousal and wonderment. He palms one curiously, before taking it into his mouth, sucking and licking until Jack hisses through his teeth and Jesse withdraws, leaving a hard, pink peak in his wake.    
  
He looks up at Jack almost like an afterthought --hadn’t thought to ask or seek permission. But Jack doesn’t seem to mind a bit, his pretty mouth open slightly, panting through barely-open lips.    
  
“Take off your shirt.” Jack exhales, eventually, his own hands working down to his belt to open it and take himself in hand. Jesse does as he’s told immediately, baring his skin to the cool air, overexposed and sensitive, looking in delight at the blond and how the pink of his cheeks has spread to his neck and almost leads down into his magnificent chest.    
  
Even better when Jack finally frees his cock, glistening and achingly hard, giving himself a few pumps. The tip of his cock is the same colour as his blush. Hot and pink and perfect.    
  
Jesse doesn’t even take off his pants. He just rucks them further down his thighs and touches himself at the sight of Jack --undone like this, radiant as the sun and all for his benefit. For his eyes only. He doesn’t miss a detail --not even when Jack’s eyes flutter shut momentarily as he squeezes the base of his own cock hard. Like he’s afraid he’ll finish before he’s had a chance to taste Jesse.    
  
Jesus, there’s a thought. Being covered in Jack’s cum, all over his stomach. Marked.    
  
Suddenly the distance between them is stifling and Jesse finds his boldness enough to tug Jack back down toward him. He’s basically being straddled at this point, and Jesse would be lying if it didn’t invite old suggestions of having Jack ride him good and proper.    
  
For now, all he can do is lie back on the warm of the couch as Jack goes for his neck again, drawing more noises out his him, pinning his wrists as he makes his way down Jesse’s body. He mouths hotly at the skin, dragging his teeth over Jesse’s hipbone just to see the younger man shiver. Then he’s ghosting Jesse’s weeping cock, breathing over it hungrily.    
  
Jesse doesn’t know what to do with himself at the sight. His wrists, now free, curl at the finger and he wishes he could sit on his hands, overcome with the desire to take fistfuls of blonde, beautiful hair, torn between the desire to feel it, and to hold Jack in place while he finally fucks that free mouth and cums down his throat.    
  
Then he’s not thinking at all, because Jack’s mouth is on him, taking half of him into a plush, inviting heat. There’s pressure, too, and he feels his tip against the heat of the roof of Jack’s mouth and cries out unintelligibly.    
  
Jack smiles around his cock. Takes him deeper without warning, opening those pretty lips wider to accommodate better. He hollows his cheeks and hums around Jesse’s cock in deep appreciation like the feeling is incredible for him --like he can’t get enough of Jesse’s taste.    
  
Jack takes him deeper. Groans appreciatively and moves his head with this practised mastery that runs like a pyroclastic flow up Jesse’s spine. When it becomes too much, and he can practically feel his cock pulsing in Jack’s mouth, his hands can no longer resist themselves and he takes Jack’s hair as gently as he can manage, guiding the older man’s movements.    
  
It’s so good. So fucking hot --because then Jack is taking him all the way to the back of his throat, enveloping him in that soft heat and overwhelming his every sense that Jesse is inhaling sharply through his teeth, tugging up inadvertently and flinching his hips. God, but Jack doesn’t even mind, taking all that Jesse can give him greedily.    
  
Then those blue, blue eyes find their way up Jesse’s body that the look of it is too much --the innocent, lust-addled look on Jack’s face is unbearable and Jesse is ashamed at how quickly he feels himself get overcome, desperately trying to stave off the dark wave of orgasm that’s swelling within him before it’s too much, and he jerks Jack’s hair hard as he coughs out.    
  
He cums in Jack’s mouth, watching the older man pull off slightly and aching with arousal as he watches that pretty mouth coated in white. It looks so good on Jack, who licks his lips hungrily. Who looks at Jesse without a single bit of shame in his form.    
  
A hand wipes at his mouth. Jack’s voice is breathless and wrecked. “You taste so good.” He croaks, affectionately, caught off-guard when Jesse uses a shy hand to brush Jack’s own, still-hard cock with a tentative finger to the underside.    
  
“What about you?” Jesse pants, trying to muster some confidence. He manages to sit himself up. He manages to ask. “What _ d’you  _ taste like?” 

  
-   
  
The hot earth feels rough against McCree’s back.    
  
He is blinded by the moonlight, blood hot over his face and shirt, scrambling backwards over a body, desperate for some help or something --until a thick, heavy boot settles on his stomach. A shotgun lowers towards his face. McCree is unarmed.    
  
The breath abducted from his body, he looks up helplessly at he expressionless white mask before him, reading into the deep, unsettling blackness of the eyesockets like he might find mercy there. But there is none.    
  
“Boss.” He pleads, uselessly, fear of death thrilling in him something more awful than the feeling of the cold, soupy blood that’s drying on him. Than the husks around him, drained of life, telling of his imminent future. “Boss, please, if --if you’re in there--”   
  
“ _ Quiet. _ ” The Reaper hisses, his voice distorted and strange. His vacant visage tilts. The hand on his gun re-adjusts, and Jesse is so certain of death that he whimpers, trying to crawl backwards again towards a gun he’d seen glinting in the dark.    
  
But no such luck. The boot on him presses harder, nailing his stomach to the ground. A sudden, loud crack before a delicate, bell-like ringing in his ears. The warning shot casts dry desert earth up into the air, and onto Jesse’s skin.    
  
_ “Hold your noise! _ ” The Reaper spits, slowly.    
  
McCree’s whole form shudders. He imagines the crack of the shotgun through his own form, turning him inside out. He imagines his blood-shadow staining this patch of earth forever. Of some stranger having to scoop his guts back in his body.    
  
“They’ll come lookin’.” He whispers, “If --if you kill me.”    
  
At that, the wraith laughs. Cackles hard and cruel. It is difficult to say for what or why, until that distorted crackle of a voice comes again. “ _ If I wanted you dead, you’d be in the ground by now. _ ”    
  
McCree doesn’t understand. But he doesn’t ask, either, aware of the weight on his stomach, and of the shotgun facing down over his heart, smoke still curling from the end of the barrel like the suggestion of something sinister. Crouching slightly, the Reaper continues.    
  
_ “There’s something for you to see, first _ .” He whispers, almost kinder. Gentler, this time, and there’s a shadow of Gabriel in there so faint and present that it registers as pain to McCree. “ _ You don’t have my permission to die until then. _ ”    
  
McCree looks at him, stiff with anticipation, awaiting something.    
  
But nothing happens.    
  
The empty look of the Reaper makes him impossible to read. Eventually, he says. “ _ Jack _ .” His voice sounds harsh and angry. “ _ The old mainframe _ .” The phrases seem unrelated. McCree tries to commit them to memory but his fear is dizzy and he cannot still his heart. Not until the Reaper hisses, “ _ Look for the northern lights. _ ”    
  
And then the boot on his stomach lifts. The shotgun, too, hesitantly, and Jesse is still staring up at the ghost of the man he once knew, wishing he knew if it was safe to speak or breath or stir a foot. When it looks like the wraith is withdrawing, floating over drained corpses, turned to go, McCree calls out.    
  
“W-wait!” He hears himself stutter. “What --what am I looking for? What’s in there?”    
  
The Reaper pauses. He still does not fully materialise, floating there like a black pall of warning. Another mercy, it appears. Another strange, strange mercy.    
  
Eventually, his silence relents. “ _ Advice _ .”    
  
“Advice?” McCree is growing bolder, now. He’s up on his elbows. His fear is waning. “On what?”    
  
Then the wraith is turning back towards him. Leaning down, slowly, deliberating. He reeks of ozone, still, and death. There are no parts alike to him and Gabriel. Not even his voice, when he says, “ _ On how not to become like this _ .”    
  
The shot rings out to McCree before he feels it.    
  
Then the cool kiss of metal. Heat, rising. Burning him from the inside out.    
  
The sensation isn’t specific. It drowns him.The spread of the shotgun shell has torn into his shoulder a thousand times. God, the blood comes instantaneously. More smoke steams from the barrel of the shotgun.    
  
After a few seconds, the Reaper tosses the gun to the ground cruelly, watching McCree’s hands come up to staunch the sudden blood as he writhes in agony, his own yells wild and secondary to him. The wraith only fully materialises again to bring his boot down on McCree’s body --on the shattered wound of his shoulder, hearing Jesse’s voice grow wild again and fill the canyon with his suffering.    
  
“ _ You’ll be the last one I kill _ .” McCree is promised, half-aware of it. Delirious, by now.    
  
There he lies, left alone in the desert --to die? To suffer this? The wound burns in his shoulder. He grasps out uselessly towards the disappearing form of the Reaper before he goes, but it does nothing, and he remains staring up at the sky as he bleeds, the spread of the shot searing into his flesh and cooking him alive from the inside out.    
  
The words replay back to him distantly. As he feels more blood come fleeing for the thirsty earth beneath him, he hallucinates lights in the sky --great bands of green and purple illuminating the sky like columns of exotic smoke. He can taste whiskey in his mouth as he sees them.    
  
Flat on his back, it’s as if he can see them in true clarity.    
  
Convinced it’s the end of times, McCree sees the northern lights. 


	6. scar tissue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> updated and beta'd by my eternal love, the infinitely wise and patience grant. (i would lay down in traffic for u.)
> 
> the poster alluded to in the second scene is seen briefly in the 'heroes' short but you find it easier [here](http://www.criticalhit.net/images/2016/05/Poster.jpg)!
> 
> almost all of my willpower comes from the beautiful mc76 discord server. i love y'all.

Jazz plays distantly in the living area. Jack plays house at the stove.   
  
He’s a lousy cook, but a sucker for novelty. And almost everything surrounding him is new.    
  
They’ve not finished building everything on-site. Zurich, he’s discovering, is snowy. The weather slows down construction and outside is freezing. He can see snow on the city through the triple glaze of the glass as he adjusts the egg frying happily away in the pan. New pan --unlike the one’s he’d gotten used to in various, improvised bases in older military buildings. Old, thick things that were crooked on one side. New spatula, too.    
  
There are some things that remain. Knick-knacks that are already cluttering up the counter, courtesy of Gabe’s nature. A wire basket in the shape of a chicken that keeps eggs. Pig-shaped salt and pepper shakers. Gabe is a bit of a knick-knack himself, humming far behind Jack as he passes through the living area, stopping to adjust Jack’s old real possession moved in thus far. An old picture of his parents.    
  
Jack isn’t much of a decorator. It’s convenient that he’ll never have to room alone. His room would be so bare.    
  
The thought plays on his mind as he hears Gabe’s humming grow louder and fonder before a warm pair of hands fix on his hips, swaying him gently to the music. Lips at his ear, a soft and fond kiss.    
  
Jack flinches despite himself, which only seems to lease Gabe all the more. “Smells good.” He murmurs, grinning.    
  
Jack nudges him away but continues to move with Gabe, liltingly. “The yolk’s still runny.” He says, as if it’s really concerning either way. “Let me finish up. I’m tired of you saying I can’t cook.”    
  
“You really can’t.” Gabe tells him, easily, quickly, running his nose up into Jack’s hair and breathing in deeply. “It won’t matter if you cook it or neglect it. You’ll burn it anyway. Dance with me.”    
  
“Charming,” Swatting with the spatula, Jack pushes the eggs around uselessly. “I think you can spare me at least one embarrassment.”    
  
Gabe still has his hips, swaying them both gently, still, his head heavy on Jack’s shoulder. “Honestly.” He tuts, faux-witheringly. “Can’t cook. Can’t dance. What _ is _ your calling, goldenrod?”    
  
It’d be mean from anybody else, but judging from the night before, and the hours before, they both know Jack is good for at least something (judging by the way Gabe walks and the glazed, sort of sated look in his eyes, that is). So Jack just huffs out a gentle laugh and leans his weight back against the other man. “I never said I couldn’t dance.”    
  
“But you can’t.”    
  
“No.” Standing, then, Jack turns to point with the spatula as if to make his point. “No. It’s very possible I can. I just don’t know how.” He lowers the utensil, and shrugs a shoulder with an easy smile. “So, in theory--”   
  
“Theory.” Gabe snorts. “Let’s find out. Come on.” His hands are coming up. Ready to embarrass the blonde as ever.    
  
With a weak protest, Jack manages, “The --the eggs--”   
  
“I’m not that hungry.” Gabe smiles. He’s already plucking the spatula out of Jack’s helpless grasp before the other man can protest, snaking a hand around Jack’s waist to tug him forward and give them both room to move. “Vamanos, Jack. Don’t make me wait.”    
  
Tugged, Jack casts a helpless look over his shoulder until there’s enough distance to justify giving up breakfast for the intimacy instead. Their time together gets snapped up more and more these days, he knows. It’s things like this that’ll mean they never become strangers to one another.   
  
The jazz continues to weave in some play at a melody. Gabe seems to find it easily, taking Jack’s hips and moving his own feet in this practised, masterful sort of way. It’s too easy for him --not immediately imitable. It isn’t until Gabe starts to actually talk that Jack can grasp the movements as deliberate and not improvisational.    
  
“You’re allowed to move your hips, y’know.” He’s told with a smirk. So Jack does, almost shyly at first which seems hilarious given where he is --given any of it, really. Then his hips are swaying but his feet are firmly rooted and that only makes it look all the more unnatural. “And your feet. C’mon, sweetheart.”    
  
Jack shakes his head. He looks at his feet, bare and clumsy next to the graceful practise of the other man. Gabe has always made everything look easy. It’s part of his cool --the charm of the defeated, even when his hat’s still in the ring. Even when he’s still determined to win.    
  
Putting one foot out, slightly, Jack shrugs. “I’m happy to concede this one.”    
  
But Gabe never gives up so easily. Then he’s coming around behind Jack and holding him tightly. They’re flush together as he nudges Jack’s feet and hips forward and back in tandem to this warm, coffee-hot sound of the saxophone. Jack feels like a liquid, lazing in these dynamic movements, for he only moves when Gabe does.    
  
“There you go.” Gabe murmurs eventually, his voice hot in Jack’s ear, breathy and sensual. “You’re a natural.”   
  
“Sure.” It comes out immediately. Just to be difficult. Jack never likes the idea that Gabe is mocking him --but it doesn’t appear he is. For they continue to move together like water, and then Gabe is taking his wrists and moving his arms as well in a simple, easy movement so that they’re really dancing. “Where’d you learn to do this?”    
  
He hears a soft peal of modest laughter by his ear. “Here and there.” Gabe tells him, simply. “My high-school specialised in performing arts. I took dance as an elective.”    
  
“You did?”    
  
“Don’t say it like that!” Gabe laughs. He releases Jack’s wrists and turns the other man so they’re facing together, still moving, but mirrored. “It’s a useful life skill. And I got to play Bernardo in our production of West Side Story.”    
  
“You did?” Jack’s nose scrunches even though he’s smiling.    
  
Gabe doesn’t take it to heart. “How did you think I got my moves?” he says, easily, one of his hands around almost absently to rest on Jack’s ass. It’s met with no resistance at all. In fact, Jack comes in a bit closer. Smiles faintly. Fondly.    
  
“I’m guessing you didn’t have some handsome west coast type around to show you the ropes.” He mouths at Gabe’s neck for a second before allowing himself a taste. After a night together and no shower, his skin tastes masculine and sweaty and authentic. It’s enticing. “Lucky me.” Jack grins.    
  
Then they’re kissing again. They’re kissing again and the eggs are burning and outside the wind absently moves the snow up and down the grounds but inside is safe and warm and nothing else matters but the faint trickle of piano that goes down Jack’s spine as he shivers.    
  
“Hmm.” He dips his head into Gabe’s shoulder. Holds on to him with intense affection as they sway. “Gabe, I--...” But it goes without saying, doesn’t it?    
  
Without even an instant, Gabe is just as quick to remind him. “Same to you.” It feels real enough that for a second, they’re not kissing, and Gabe’s hands have moved up to his back just to hold him. A peace rarely afforded --a moment their ghosts will drag themselves back to as a quiet before their circumstances demand distance between them. A hallelujah morning.    
  
Aside, quietly, Gabe says, “You could really use a shower.”    
  
Jack laughs. “You too.”    
  
-   
  
The subway tunnel is empty. The train isn’t due for another six or seven minutes.   
  
Jesse shivers on the track in the darkness. Snow is still drying on the fabric of his serape, and it clings heavily to him, the vermillion dampened to the colour of blood, chilling his bones. Even the metal of his arm is cold to touch, drawn in to ease the shivers.   
  
He puts a hand on the wall and walks down further in the darkness, hunched and bitter. There’s no snow this far underground, and he’s all the gladder for it, even if it means venturing where the rats scurry away at his footfalls and spiders retreat back into their webs in hesitance. Rail burn dulls the shine of the tracks so that he has nothing to follow.   
  
Nothing but the cold concrete against one hand.   
  
He ventures deeper and the darkness gets thicker. The air remains the same, damp and frigid, and distantly he can hear the hollow rattle of trains on other tracks. The hand not on the wall reaches into his back pocket when the darkness becomes too thick, and he brings out a small lighter. Plain metal. He lights it one-handed in a flourish that he saw when he was fifteen and thought was the neatest thing.   
  
The tunnel is worse for the light. The flame dances and trembles in the air, and the shadows behind him of spiders and debris grow and shrink monstrously. It sheds light on forgotten graffiti that grows sparser the more he walks. Simple, four-letter words, and the occasional picture. Old billings from local events that have been coated in black dust that covers the faded ink below.   
  
His hands trace a loose corner of paper, and it startles him faintly. As he turns to look at it, the flame on the lighter dies, and he has to relight it, again, grateful for the intense but small output of heat, yellowing the old listing for a flower shop, somewhere.   
  
Further ahead, he can see a slight cutaway that must be a service door. A safe place to sleep, he knows. Anonymous and hidden. Away from the winter that he is so desperate to escape.   
  
He makes towards it with careful footsteps, aware that the train is due to arrive in but a few moments. The ground beneath his feet is already starting to rattle by the time he comes upon the door, the handle rusty and useless, locked to him for the moment. Jesse knows he could pick it, but there’s not another soul down here, and his hands are still too raw from the elements to have the precision.   
  
Switching hands with his lighter, he unholsters the gun, pressing it to the lock, and then sees something, beyond the corner of his eye. Further past the door, obscured by the dirt that festers on the tunnel walls, he can see a tiny, faded scrap of blue.   
  
Jesse hesitates, holstering the weapon again to step towards it.   
  
Part of what looks like a white circle is still visible before the rest of the poster has succumbed to dirt and overspill of red spray paint, flecking the blue to have it resemble some kind of murder scene. Jesse moves a hand towards it to wipe roughly at the paper. He doesn’t care a bit about the thick blackness that coats the blade of his palm and smears across the paper, thinner, because now he can see what it is.   
  
The yellow ink hasn’t aged well. If Jesse hadn’t seen it before he wouldn’t recognise this half of the picture --but he has. Many, many years before.

  
He couldn’t forget Jack Morrison’s face for his life. Even if it isn’t how he remembers the man, stuck on the paper, looking tall and proud, the blue of his coat visible by the gold of his hair aptly washed out to white. Even underneath the layer of dirt, and the age of the paper, it’s unmistakable, and the Overwatch symbol stands proudly to his right, as if balanced on his shoulder. Ever the Atlas.   
  
Jesse reaches out, still shivering. He wipes another clean stripe from the paper, revealing other old faces, faded, but there nonetheless, staring back hauntingly. People who have forgotten about him, or those he has tried to forget. The poster looks just as he remembers it, though he hasn’t seen one in years. Most were torn down or drawn over. Purposefully buried.   
  
For a reason he can’t easily fathom, the sight saddens him. Maybe because when he wipes at it again, he can’t find any signs of Reyes --the face he’d be comforted by most. The sight of Ana would destroy him, and he knows it as he brushes down more of the paper, finding only misery. Finding Angela, of all people, radiant in white beneath the blackness.    
  
She looks like she’s standing on Reinhardt’s shoulder. Young, there, sweeter than Jesse ever had the grace to know. How can he muster the heart to think of Angela? Of any of them, and how he left them -- suddenly and anonymously. She must think him dead like the rest of them. Perhaps that’s better.    
  


It’s funny --he realises, then, that he saw something so similar before he even knew any of those pictures. It was just of Morrison, though --a stylised profile shot, with a series of flags at his shoulder, looking regal and dignified and proud. It was pasted up outside of a general store and Jesse must have been fifteen when he saw it first --confused by it, but endeared, too.    
  
He’d never seen any men like that --with worlds on their shoulders, and proud, dignified smiles on their handsome faces.    
  
And for five minutes, maybe that was Jesse, too.    
  
Bitterly --sadly, Jesse flattens the blade of his arm against the top of the poster, the lighter burning against the wall, the flame hissing in complaint. With his free hand, Jesse finds a loose corner at the bottom. In a clean, hard motion, he tears. There’s no time to be neat. In less than a minute or two, the train will be upon him.    
  
Folding the paper hastily, and caring not a button for the darkness or dirt, he shoves it into his back pocket and extends the lighter again. The cutaway of the service door is less than five meters back, and he treads carefully towards it, having shaken the worst of the cold off. He draws his gun again and shoots the lock --the shot ringing throughout the tunnel and his ear, sending the rats scurrying again.    
  
Inside is nothing --empty, grimy darkness. But a safe darkness nonetheless. Jesse closes the door after him and briefly despairs that he ever deserted Blackwatch for this. He took no badge and gun with him. Took nothing, really. The span of those years has no winner since Zurich went up in smoke. Maybe there were only ever degrees of losing --losing the Boss, losing Miss Ana -losing his arm, somehow.    
  
He doesn’t remember. Maybe that’s a mercy.    
  
At a loss, he remains, on the surly floor, in the dark, drawing his limbs into his body and trying to keep himself warm. He closes his eyes. Tries to sleep, if he can, fighting his every terrible instinct that has been screaming at him to  _ keep moving  _ these past few years.    
  
Hours pass, like that. And when it becomes unbearable, he flicks open his lighter again, the flame surrendered to the look of a weary firefly in the dank of the air, using the light of it to look at the poster again.    
  
His fingers settle on Morrison’s face. He looks at it, longingly, even if he never knew the man much at all. It’s the last thing he’s conscious of as he falls asleep.    
  
(He’s unconscious for the blood that trails out of his left ear. And from his nose, briefly, marking the paper where Lena’s face is.    
  
A single drop of red.)   
  
-   
  
Drip. Drip-drip.    
  
Jesse toes the cold tap experimentally. Feels a drip no bigger than a pearl trail down his foot and silently into the bathwater. Dropping his leg again, he watches, and sure enough, as if on beat, the cold tap drips again, audibly, with nothing to interrupt its passage. He looks over his shoulder through the haze of steam that’s tailing from the bathroom and into the bedroom beyond where he can hear movement.    
  
Then, after a few seconds of silence, he hears the door creak again, and Jack appears, filling the door, wearing nothing but his sweats. He has a towel slung over one of his arms, and glass of something amber-coloured that’s likely rye bourbon.    
  
“Getting out anytime soon?” Jack asks him, coming around to put the towels on a rack, stepping over Jesse’s clothes and sitting on the edge of the bath. He takes a small sip of his drink. “Some of us have to be up early, y’know.”    
  
Jesse turns on his side in the water, as if making a space, conscious of how visible he is. There are no bubbles and an insufficient amount of steam to cover him. “Hop on in.” Jesse smiles, easily. “Water’s jus’ fine.”    
  
True to form, that has Jack rolling his eyes, but he dips one of his free hands in the water like he’s considering it, withdrawing after a quick second with a tut. “You have the water way too hot for me, anyway.”    
  
It’s more pragmatic than Jesse would like. He feels playful and romantic enough himself, lightheaded with steam, the smell of Jack’s soap all over him. Only officer’s quarters have baths, anyway, and Jesse wants to make the most of this time they’ve got. He’s conscious of the now. Just one look at Jack and he knows the older man is hours ahead, to the next morning, to the plethora of bad news he’ll shoulder before the sun is even up.    
  
“Aw, it ain’t so bad.” Despite himself, Jese comes up to the side of the bath and nudges Jack gently, vying for his attention. “I know what’d cool you off afterwards.” He grins. “An alcohol rub. Or --or cologne.”    
  
Jack doesn’t seem to share his enthusiasm. Or if he does note the subtext, he disregards it. “I don’t feel like bathing on the face of the sun.” He says, mildly. “And a rub’s only good after a workout.”    
  
It’s an interesting word choice, and it piques Jesse’s optimism enough that he says, “Well, y’know, we could always--”   
  
“I’m --I’m not in the mood.” Then Jack is standing. Walking a few steps away from the bath, suddenly unreachable to Jesse’s wet and helpless grip. He takes another sip of his drink while Jesse stares at the back of his head, and, not for the first time, finds himself wishing he could walk around in there. Wishing the other man wasn’t such a question mark to him.    
  
In a softer, more apologetic tone, Jack says, “Just don’t be too much longer, okay?”    
  
Jesse turns onto his back again and watches the cold tap drip into the bathwater again, a little dejectedly. “Sure thing, chief.” He murmurs. They remain in a silence then. Jack drinks. Jesse watches the drip of the tap and wonders what things tomorrow could hold for Jack. Maybe it’s better Jesse doesn’t know. Hell, even if he wanted to, it’s not like --...   
  
He toes the cold tap again and says, “You ever heard about Chinese Water Torture?”    
  
The non-sequitur doesn’t seem to surprise Jack much. “Sure.” He says.    
  
“Don’t it seem strange t’you that somethin’ so small as a drippin’ tap could drive a man crazy?” He turns his head to look back at Jack, who looks passive and cool. His lips are parted. The steam has his hair falling into his face --patches of starlight grey creeping into his temples. The only advance of age’s pale flag. He looks so dignified.    
  


Those blue eyes focus back into the room after less than a second of absence. “I always thought it was a myth.” Jack shrugs.    
  
“Water torture?”    
  
“No,” Jack shakes his head with a sort of haunted notion. “No, water torture’s real. Just not that kind, I don’t think.” He takes another neat sip and then places his glass own on the shelf by the mirror. As he does, Jesse notes, his hands are shaking ever-so-slightly. Stress, maybe? Nerves?    
  
Jesse doesn’t ask about it. He finishes washing his hair quietly, coming up clean to the sight of Jack re-entering the room with his packet of cigarettes.    
  
“You don’t mind, do you?” Jack asks him, even though he’s already holding one between his fingers. Not that Jesse ever would, shaking his head at Jack, watching him light the thing with an unusual sort of practise. Jesse only ever sees him smoke on occasions --at junkets, maybe, or after a particularly important press conference. Sometimes before he’s boots-on-ground for something, too.    
  
Relief, or apprehension, anyway. That’s what has Jack taking a long, comfortable drag.    
  
They way he holds it in his lungs as his other hand touches his brow worriedly --and the way his hand shakes again every so slightly as he takes the cigarettes out his mouth to exhale are all hallmark signs of distress.    
  
So Jesse gets out --stands up in the bath and lets most of the excess water drip off of him before he climbs onto the bathmat, taking a towel from the rack --careful not to steal one of the nice ones Jack had just brought in. Briefly, he dries, slinging the towel around his neck before he steps towards his man carefully.    
  
“Somethin’ wrong?” Jesse asks, in his lowest voice; the one Jack knows as an indication of serious. In a delicate movement, Jesse purloins the cigarette and puts it between his own lips so the older man will have no agency for silence.    
  
“It’s fine.” Jack says. Shrugs, like he always does, turning away like he suddenly needs to busy himself with re-arranging the bottles by his sink. It’s enough to have Jesse lift an arm and physically grasp Jack’s upper arm, twisting so that they’re facing.    
  
“Talk t’me.” Jesse says, quietly, lowly. “Please.”    
  
Jack resists him. Pulls away restlessly and looks elsewhere when he says, “There’s nothing to talk about.” He says, passively. “It’s not for you to worry about--”   
  
“Not this again!” With a sudden raise in voice, Jesse tugs the cigarette out of his mouth and crushes it out in the soapcatch. “I thought we sorted this. I thought you weren’t gonna --gonna keep things from me no more--”   
  
Jack’s turn to raise his voice. To turn, defensively, his jaw clenched tightly shut before he snaps, “It’s not that simple.” He says it cuttingly, like Jesse is too stupid to figure that much out. “I can’t--”   
  
But it’s too late to appeal to Jesse’s sensibilities. “I’d say it’s exactly that simple.” He says, bitterly. “‘Less you think there’s some part a’ this I ain’t gonna understand.”    
  
Jack throws his hands up helplessly, like he can’t win. “Jess, for god’s sake” One of his fingers comes to point in a nasty sort of accusation. “It’s --I don’t want you getting involved in any of this. I-In --In anything you can’t get out of--”    
  
The ambiguity is infuriating. Jesse fights the urge to grab Jack by the shoulders and shake some truth out of him --or, at least embrace him to end the hostility between them. “Any a’ what?!” Jesse hisses. “I’m involved with  _ you _ , aint’ I? I  _ chose _ t’be. Y’really think you can get me into anythin’ I wanna get out of?”    
  
Cornered, his shoulders all tight and angry, Jack yells out, “Yes!” He huffs a few knifelike breaths and says again. “Yes, I  _ do _ . When it comes to Reyes.”    
  
Even just the name has Jesse drawing back. Shrinking. Relinquishing the fight, ever so slightly. It happens so quickly that Jack hates it. Despises Jesse’s fear and worship. A man cannot serve two masters. How can Jack deal with Reyes when Jesse is still half-hiding in the other man’s sleeve? This had been easier those three weeks back, when Jesse had shatter his legs, and was drowsy enough on painkillers not to push the matter like he’s pushing now.    
  
Shrugging, suddenly smaller, Jesse murmurs, “Jack, it’s not--...” He cants his head hopelessly. “I wanna know what’s goin’ on. Even when it comes to Reyes.”    
  
Jack is already shaking his head before the end of the sentence. “I know you do. I know.” He says, even if it doesn’t sound like he’s hearing Jesse at all. “But putting you in that situation --it’s a conflict of interests--”   
  
“An’ this ain't?!” Incredulously, Jesse cries out. He feels himself swell to full height again it utter frustration. “At least be  _ consistent _ , Jack, for Chrissake!”    
  
For one of the first times since they’ve had this age-old argument, a remark lands. Jesse lets his mouth close like it’ll take the words back, but it doesn’t, and all he can do is watch as the words crawl under Jack’s skin and make his face pale with grief and conflict --Stalingrad white.    
  
Jack’s hands tighten at his sides. He looks lost as to what to do with them. “You want consistency?” his voice is that low, sharp sort of timbre. It indicates danger. “Fine.” With an unnerving sort of calm, Jack works his jaw as he picks up his glass again. “I’m appealing at a summit tomorrow on Gabe’s behalf so that he won’t get court-martialled.”    
  
Jack drinks. He drinks and Jesse feels his mouth come open at the suggestion. He thinks of Reyes as he knows him: a benevolent sort of shadow, the is the last face he sees and the first he is greeted by on any sort of operation. Eternally, Reyes exists in his memory, leaning against a wall and smoking, music in his ears, his eyes catching occasional jealous glances at Jesse but hiding them well enough.    
  
Those images can’t be married in Jesse’s mind with court-martial: he thinks the blindfold, the firing squad. The final cigarette.    
  
Finally, he finds it in him to squawk. “W-what’s that mean, exactly?” His words shed a trembling light on the way he deifies too easily the ones he loves.  “What they tryin’ him for?”    
  
With a still-trembling hand, Jack puts the glass down. He swallows whatever is left in his mouth and looks almost relieved --almost. There’s a permanent sort of conflict on his face when it comes to Reyes. Hell, to Blackwatch really.    
  
“If you don’t already know,” Jack murmurs, solemnly, “then this is me giving you plausible deniability.”    
  
And that’s that, for him. He draws his line in the sand with ease. Without so much as a last look, he turns and starts to walk passively into the other room, past his divider and up by the bed. He even gets in without another word. Jesse watches at a loss. His jaw works a few times --there are lots of things he could say.    
  
But he doesn’t.    
  
Not until he’s dressed again, hastily, half-way out the door when he calls back, “Have it your way, then.”    
  
And Jack does, too. He says nothing more and leaves Jess to march down the corridors and back to his own empty bed, shouldering all of his sudden anger --and all of his fear. His mind is stuck on Reyes --the hand that pulled him out of his grave. Isn’t there anything he can do? Or is it left to Jack’s mercy?    
  
Some mercy. Jesse doesn’t need to be protected, and least of all from the truth --and least of all from the truth about his only god. It would be easier if he never knew Gabe, and infinitely sadder. It would be easier, too, if he never knew Jack. But Christ, Jesse has so much on his sleeves thanks to the both of them and none of it registers to him as regret.    
  
He goes to bed with that thought --angry, irrational. Twisting in the sheets and wondering if Jack is even losing any sleep over this. Or if he is quite comfortable resting, proudly playing this part of some protector. It keeps Jesse up for hours, hot in the sheets with his own indignation, and alone, too.    
  
He gets maybe ten minutes, give or take, of suffering like that, and the he hears a chime to indicate there’s somebody at his door.    
  
It’s raining outside. He can hear it, distantly, as he clambers through the darkness towards the door with a heavy head. His mouth is dry as cotton, and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to speak when he slides the door open, tiredly, scowling at the sudden hall light.    
  
There’s something you don’t see often --the Strike Commander, deep in the heart of Blackwatch territory. His eyes look tired. His blonde hair is wet and limp. He’s leaning against the cutaway of the door, looking smaller.    
  
Jesse can’t help but cut his eyes about the corridor worriedly, making sure they’re alone before he murmurs, “What--”   
  
“Couldn’t sleep.” Jack murmurs, his voice a little rough in the way that suggests he hasn’t used it much in the hours since they last parted. “I keep thinking about tomorrow.”    
  
Jesse, having every right to be angry, finds only kindness to say, “Me, too.” He squints awkwardly, about to ask something --anything pertaining to why Jack is here in the small hours of the morning, but he’s beaten to the punch.    
  
“I -I’m sorry.” Jack murmurs. His voice is low and soft. Sweet with apology. “I know you don’t need me to keep things from you --I shouldn’t have done that.” Then, sighing, his head comes to lean against the door jamb, too. “It’s just, the further away from any of this you can be, the safer you’ll be.”    
  
Jesse fights the urge to touch the other man. To give in. It shouldn’t be this easy to win back his good favour --but it is. One look at Jack and he’s undone. “Yeah.” Jesse murmurs, fighting with himself. “I ‘ppreciate that an’ all --I  _ do _ . But it ain’t your decision to make.” He mutters it, though. Accountability. Backbone.    
  
Sad as it is to think, Reyes would be proud of him right now.    
  
Jack seems to be, too He smiles a tragic little smile. “You’re right, Jess.” He sighs. “I just didn’t want to --to leave things, how they were.”    
  
Without thinking, still licking his wounds from earlier, Jese can’t help himself to say, “Then don’t make things how they were.” Jack bristles, but before he can interject, Jesse holds up a hand. “Look, I get it. I do. Y’got the best of intentions about all this.” His hand drops. “Jus’ --we’re s’posed to be _ equals  _ in this. An’ I don’t keep nothin’ from you--...”   
  
Jack nods. “Yeah.” He says, quietly, lowly, his eyes coming up slowly and settling on Jesse’s mouth. Tilting his head, he comes forward, into Jesse, brushing his temple with his lips. “Yeah. I know.” The touch is permitted, and then encouraged, and Jesse moves with him, finding his lips with a hesitant sort of fondness.    
  
Then they’re touching, fully, embracing, and Jesse steps backwards to lead them into the room.    
  
The door closes behind him.    
  
At some point, they make it to bed.    
  
-   
  
Under the veil of darkness, he slips in silently.    
  
Nobody sees him or is seen, isolated this side of the old base, where the red rock whispers in the darkness and once-gleaming steel is just as orange. The layout is familiar to him, and just like a foot in an old shoe, he finds a place of refuge where one will come looking. Inside hasn’t changed but with age and vacancy. There’s so little left of the place.    
  
And yet, when he hears the waves crash upon themselves in the distance and takes in the warm, humid air of the Spanish night, he is filled with memories, too.    
  
He never meant to come back here. But it’s Jesse’s been brought, and he knows how much is at stake. Maybe it would be best to let this all go.    
  
Too late, now, when only a few hours after arrival, he hears the telltale hiss and crackle of static --sees the glow of pink emanating from every room and window, and knows that it’s time.    
  
The generator room is still in the same place. It’s a print lock, and no sooner does he press it to open that the dim of the access panel sharpen into pale blue light as Athena’s airless voice comes back to him after what feels like centuries of silence.    
  
“Good evening, Strike Commander Morrison.” He hears her say as he passes through into the tiny room, where in the middle, floats a dark, square file with a strident, furious pink skull pasted over it, cutting lines through it. Thin in substance as air, he can pass a hand through it and feel nothing. “It has been two-thousand, three-hundred and forty-seven days since you were last present at this facility.”    
  
Yet, the feeling he is filled with, to see the words ‘n0th3rn-l1ght5’ is an enhanced and singular disquiet.    
  
He goes over to the thickest cables --to the backup generator, which has to be manually shutoff after security protocols have been over-ridden. He doesn’t know how much time there is left --if Jesse is seeing this, too: if the words have any meaning left to him at all, but there’s no time to wonder when the skull disappears and is replaced with something even worse.    
  
_ ‘Considera tus pecados’  _ _   
_ _   
_ At the switch, now, he coughs out in the dark. “Requesting backup generator override.” But it’s as if there’s no time, because the room is plunged into darkness as the text is disappearing and the file is opening and then worst of all the audio is playing and to his own ears Jack hears his voice murmur, “ _ We’re recording _ .” and it brings back a memory he wishes he could purge from his own mind.    
  
Athena’s systems hesitate. Another hiss from the recording as his old voice whispers,  _ “Jess? _ ”. Every second of it is slander. He pictures Jesse as conscious --thrown into a sudden recall, knowing all of Jack’s sins (or at least, the first of them), the image of it married suddenly with being in that room again, touching Jesse’s hand and trying his damndest not to show pain. Not to make it any harder for Jesse.    
  
“Overriding security protocols.” Athena says, mildly, unaware of the storm before Jack's eyes --the interface not sophisticated enough to even recognise the hacked spile that’s spilling into every room of this whole facility.    
  
The tension is unbearable. Jack feels sick with grief. His hand is on the killswitch as he waits for the light on the generator to die, his ears burning with every word he’ should have swallowed:  _ “C’mon, Jess. This is --let’s make this as easy as we can.” _   
  
But none of this is easy. Not even when his hand is on the switch and he throws it, leaving only the main generator to power this atrocity. All that’s left is to give the order. To send the base into darkness and emancipate himself --and Jesse, from any further pain.    
  
But he can’t. His mouth hesitates and clamps up as the order dies in his throat the moment he hears Jesse’s weak, reedy whisper of a voice murmurs to him.  _ “O-okay.” _ Jack closes his eyes to hear it. Begs his brain not to recall the scene.  _ “I --I’m ready.”  _   
  
It winds him. Knocks the wind and life and oxygen from him, and then Jack is coming to kneel on the floor of the room. Bringing his aching, stiff knees up into himself. His gloved hands reach just in front of his ears, for the clasp of his visor, and in a second, it comes away with a click, leaving the room dark to him. Stranding him in the void of this memory.    
  
Even if he could see, now, it would spare him no singular ounce of pain.    
  
So he drags his hands over his face like he’s trying to hide himself, and just --just listens. Like he doesn’t know it by rote. Like he hasn’t listened to this back a thousand times in the past and made himself sick with it. It’s been years --long enough that each word comes back to him and cuts him over scar tissue.    
  
He sits. He listens. He forces himself to bear it.    
  
And then he can, no longer.    
_   
_ _ “I --I knew somethin’ was gonna happen then, y’know?”  _ _   
_ _   
_ “Athena.” He calls out, voice thick and ugly with pain. “Kill the power.”    
  
_ “ _ _ S-somethin’ wonderff--” _   
  


 


	7. night swimming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow. okay. this killed me to write.  
> my endless love and affection to grant, who makes this readable to human eyes, and to reaper-chan too! 
> 
> also thanks and adoration beyond hino whose art [here](https://hinoart.tumblr.com/post/155523688507) was the inspiration for this fic, and whose art has been inspired by it. [here's](https://hinoart.tumblr.com/tagged/jesse+mccree) a piece they've done from chapter 3!!
> 
> i suffered so much to bring u this. if u liked ir, or even if u hated it, i'd love to hear from u!

Voices ring out in the hall.    
  
Jesse sits in darkness.    
  
The blood from his ear has reached his neck, now. The blood from his nose is at his lip, and it’s the only sensation he’s cognizant of --the heat of it. The tang of iron. His brain burns, too much to registers, flickering with all the speed and chaos of television static, overwhelming him.    
  
The skull has disappeared. The file, with it. Only darkness, hanging in the air, and those words, playing back in Jesse’s mind over and over and over:  _ ‘somethin’ wonderful _ ’.    
  
Eventually, the voices ring closer, even if they blur to his ears. Jesse feels as if he can’t move, as if he has melted into the floor and is staring up from beneath it uselessly. As if underwater, he sees white-hot beams as if from flashlights that pierce the darkness in the hall and turn towards his room. Distantly, they look like stars. Pinpricks in the dark curtain of heaven.    
  
Most of all, Jesse feels himself paralysed, trembling but still, the blood scalding every part of his skin that he touches. He wishes he could raise a finger --could raise his voice to speak, but nothing happens. Nothing happens, and the hot beams of light come to him, eventually. They find his form and his face.    
  
Blurry figures attached to the lights find him. Everything is blunted and strange to him --he cannot say to which friend he is seen by first. Or which hand it is that wipes at the blood on his neck. Voices raise again --fearful, panicking. Jesse feels a million miles away.    
  
A hand is on his neck --is chasing his pulse desperately, and as he is maneuvered, his eyes scan the pierces darkness. He thinks he sees some apparition --the faint and distant outline of a man undressing. His jaw is strong, and his eyes shine like lakes that once shimmered and are now dry. Glowing, invisible to the others, unaffected by their harsh, burning lights, he takes off his clothes in the dark.    
  
All the while, the lights burn his eyes and his body is grabbed --fistfuls of fabric pulled and shaken. Voices that nearly reach him before dissolving back into obscurity.    
  
But Jesse just watches the apparition cross the room. Watches him peel back some ghostly sheet, and then --and then--   
  
Then he wakes.    
  
Same base. Jesse recognises the room as he comes to in an initial panic --not the one he’d sequestered earlier, but an infirmary bed in an otherwise empty infirmary. They’ve only just started operating again. Wheeled trays are dusty, in corners. Paint curls. There’s nothing remotely comforting about the place, save for the large, closed window far to his left. It tells of gloaming: morning will come soon, but as for now, darkness still pervades outside.    
  
Jesse is alone. It gives him enough time to try to piece together the events that lead him here. There’s still poppy gauze pressed to his shoulder from his encounter with Gabriel in the desert. He’d laid there dying for hours --for what might have been forever, until somebody came. Angela. Angela had come for him. How she’d known where to be, he isn’t sure. But Jesse’s never been one to question providence.    
  
He was taken to this old base, back to Gibraltar, mostly against his will. Jesse’s memories are dusty. These confuse him too much for this place to be of any real ease. He hardly recalls why he left. Only the leaving.    
  
He’d gone through Jack’s old files. He remembers that --finding the northern lights he’d been warned of. Then, the skull. The sins. The words.    
  
Something wonderful?    
  
His mind is a mess, distracted and at some great divide. He tries to recall the words he’d heard --the ones that were important enough that whatever remains of Gabriel spared his life for them.    
  
But nothing sticks. He replays the scene, uselessly, again and again like the twitching agonies of a madman, but finds himself vacant. And not for the first time, either. What had Gabriel wanted so ardently for him to know? Enough that he’d spare his life, where he has spared no other before it?    
  
Jesse wonders if some distant part of Gabe remains. How much easier that would be to swallow. God, he thinks of all the time he spent hiding in Gabe’s sleeve, staring at at him in wonder. Is there any left behind the mark of what they once knew?    
  
He remembers, once, seeing a slogan carved in the stone of a church’s steps that said ‘ _ when my strength failith, forsake me not _ ’. Jesse is tired --he’s been tired for a long time. But Gabriel is nowhere. Dead and buried. Has he really been forsaken?    
  
The image of a man occurs to him, then. Existing only in moonlight. Moving across a dark room that might well be a highway at night or an ocean floor. Undressing. Walking towards a bed. It’s as if he only exists in a dream, and as Jesse tries to sharpen the image in his mind’s eye, he realises that the apparition is more than just dreaming.    
  
It’s the Strike Commander. As Jesse might have known him, had they ever spoken much at all.    
  
Was it Jack’s voice he’d heard? Briefly, transiently, talking to him from the past before the darkness had taken him? He recalls the tone of the other man. Somewhere between cold and hurt. Like a lion liking its wounds, trying to mask the pain. The specifics of the words are impossible to recall, and even the trying makes Jesse feel all the worse.    
  
He doesn’t remember.    
  
Doesn’t  _ understand _ what he remembers.    
  
His thoughts scatter when he hears footsteps, out in the hall. Then, terrified, he pulls himself out of bed even though his bones rattle and feel hollow. He still has no explanation for the sudden darkness, and with years of the bount weighing on his shoulders, his instinct is already overcoming him. His organic hand muffles the sound of his breathing. He crouches, hidden behind the bed.    
  
His exit strategy is the widow, behind him, now, which bleeds prussian blue moonlight into the room, creating a shadow he has to hide.    
  
The handle of the door rattles. Jesse readies himself.    
  
Then, white-hot light again. A silhouette cutting a pretty shape into it. One of safety and familiarity. Angela stands in the door shouldering a great many things, her weary eyes scanning the cut darkness as she calls out, “Jesse?”    
  
It has been long enough that Jesse wonders, momentarily, if she is worth his trust. But he still has the remnants of that poster, somewhere --when he’d seen her visage, and it reminds him which side of the gun he’s really on. Angela, and the rest of them, have thought him dead and mourned him these past few years. He is indebted to them, and trust is all he can give.    
  
Emerging, he tries to make it seem as if he hadn’t been hiding. “Angie.” he calls back to her, his tiredness clear in the timbre of his voice. “What --what happened?”    
  
She comes across the room with the light click of heels. It’s a sound Jesse always associates with warmth. Even if he hasn’t known that many women at all. Maybe it was his mother, though he has no intact memory of her. The mind forgets, he knows, but the body still misses.    
  
He perches back on the bed, and Angela on the other side.    
  
“I’m not so sure.” She says. Her face is stricken with grief and worry. The moonlight only illuminates what her composure hides. He goes nightswimming in her eyes to try to read the root of her concern.    
  
But not before she lifts a nervous hand and takes his face, examining him. “It looks as if we had an infiltration. It doesn’t look like anything has been stolen or damaged.” Her other hand moves down to his metal arm --Jesse flinched despite himself. “Nothing was broken into, either. Whoever caused the power cut has been here before.”    
  
Jesse thinks once more of the apparition. Then, his sense thinks of Gabriel.    
  
Of his two commanding officers, only one remains to some sense alive.    
  
Angela doesn’t seem to comment beyond that. She looks over his arm with great care. “I’m sure Winston would be happy to tune it for you.” her fingers move higher like she wants to take it now. “And it isn’t good for you to wear it constantly.”    
  
“I know.” Jesse says, as a reflexive response, pulling away from her touch. “I can --I can ask him about it in the mornin’.” His nerves are too shot. God, he has so many questions. He scarcely knows where to begin. “D’you s’pose it was Gabriel that was here?”    
  
Angela looks at him, then. Her eyes move away with some great sorrow --a sorrow Jesse knows intimately. He has seen this sort of sadness with no clothes on all too often: they were all close to Gabriel.    
  
“I don’t think he would have left us in such peace.” She murmurs. “Not anymore.” Something old in Jesse comes to life at that. Some sort of defensiveness. To hear Gabriel spoken of as he is now --well, he knows, Gabe is likely dead for the most part. Angela isn’t an iconoclast for saying it; it merely feels that way.    
  
The sadness extends between them into silence. Jesse can hardly stand it.    
  
“What about --what about that --that file?” He swallows. He fears the answer almost as much as he knows he needs it. It takes hysterical strength to ask. “I --I remember hearin’ my voice, an’ --an’ the Strike Commanders, an’ then--”   
  
Angela is shaking her head. One of her hands comes up to his face again. “Calm down.” She tells him, with a voice that’s as smooth and serious as tempered steel. “You’re --you’re bleeding again.”    
  
Jesse doesn’t even get the chance to raise a hand before Angela does, tracing his ear and pulling back only to show him her fingertip, crimson and shining. That scares him, most of all.    
  
He takes her wrist in a hard and sudden motion, bringing her in close with unintended cruelty. Angela makes a noise of pain but protests little, close as she is to him, looking up at him with eyes that are heavy. It could be guilt. It could be loss. Jesse cannot say for sure.    
  
Whispering, then, his voice tight and afraid. “Listen,” he looks at her desperately, “Somethin’s goin’ on here, Ang. Somethin’ bigger than this.” Angela opens her mouth but doesn’t say anything. Jesse wonders if she’s on the verge of crying out in pain or confessing. His grip relaxes, but he keeps her close. “I don’t remember sayin’ those things --whatever it was I said. An’ I --I don’t remember--...”    
  
Then it occurs to him.    
  
He lets her go in horror. Angela puts a little more distance between them. “You’re unwell.” She murmurs.    
  
But Jesse can hardly hear her. He looks down at his arm, glinting in the moonlight, as coy as any mystery. He looks back at Angela in horror. “That --that tape.” He stutters, “An’ --an’ my arm. They’re r-related, ain’t they?”    
  
Angela looks at him helplessly. Her mouth opens and closes again, the sorrow on her face somehow sharper than when she’s been talking of Gabriel. When she does speak, her words are stifled and meaningless. “Y-you need to rest--”   
  
“No!” Jesse lurches forward again. He grabs her tight so that she can’t escape him. “No, you --you  _ answer _ me, Angie.” His breath comes in angry, short bursts. His chest feels tight and hot and boiling, the pressure increasing. “What happened to my arm?”    
  
She shakes her head again. Tears have broken freely down her face and she keeps jerking backwards in fear and agony. As if just the question alone is unbearable. “I-I can’t,” She blubbers, uselessly. Trying to look away. “You’re delirious, Jesse --p-please.” Her voice breaks into a ragged little whisper, “Let go of me!”    
  
“No!” Jesse starts to pull, now. His paranoia and the pressure in his chest has culminates, and it’s as if this dark wave within him has swelled. Her other hand scratches and pushes at him as he brings her closer with some superhuman inhumanity --he doesn’t care. He can’t feel anything beyond the numb of the metal. Beyond the swirling, sick emptiness of his own head. “Did you do it, Angie?! Did they ask y’to take it?!”    
  
She struggles furiously, now, her tears an afterthought as she bucks to free herself pathetically. “No!” She sobs to him, “No, I -- _ I don’t know _ !”    
  
It’s not good enough. “Bullshit!”    
  
Angela’s tears are running her still. She shakes her head again and again. “I -I don’t--”   
  
“Then who does?!” He’s shaking her, now. Alight with all of these years of questions that he has shouldered, with nowhere to put them. Filled with fear and sickness and the ghost of a dead man he never knew plaguing him --driving him to this. “Who knows how--”   
  
“ _ Fareeha _ !”    
  
Then Angela’s body goes limp. She resists him no longer, moving only with the sharp intake of her breath and the remnants of her tears, her face dropping into his body helplessly. “She --Ana was --w-was there. Fareeha’s all--...” She takes in a trembling breath. “Fareeha’s the only one l-left who knows.”    
  
Jesse’s senses come back to him. The weight of those questions --the weight of the fear: it leaves him, as it always does, in the moments he needs the crutch most. And then he is left to see what he has done. The dark, angry marks that remain on Angela’s skin when his hands relax and he lets go of her. The fear of god in her very form as he des. She flinches at every movement. Once released, she moves back from him slowly and carefully as if she’s scared she’ll startle him again.    
  
The tears in her eyes have not dried. When Jesse looks at them this time, there is no nightswimming. He swears he drowns.    
  
All the worse when Angela lifts one of her shaking hands to wipe at her face. “I-I’m sorry.” She whispers.    
  
Jesse’s insides burn. Every convulsive twist of his gut feels acidic and wrong. How could he do that to her? How could she know? He leans forward to try to give her some comfort, but the second he does, she clambers backwards, afraid once more.    
  
She gives him a look. Stern and watery. Like she is seeing him wholly for what he is.    
  
And then she goes. She leaves the room quickly, muffling her other sobs, giving him no last look. No final words.    
  
It’s better that way. He can’t hurt her if there is distance between them. But then Jesse is left in the room that is still spinning off its axis. The fear returns to him, and all of those questions. Only now, he is wondering if the loss of his arm was in some way deserved. If he has always been this cruel, or if the time has rot his insides.    
  
He doesn’t get any more sleep. He doesn’t dare to dream.    
  
Over and over, he tries to remember the words he’d heard on that tape. It had been important. It had been his resolution. That’s what Gabriel had said; right?   
  
‘Advice’. On how not to become like him.    
  
Jesse thinks it might be too late for that.    
  
-   
  
He’s never seen Gabe storm out of a room like that.   
  
And only fresh off of Commander Reyes’ coattails, Jack goes after him.    
  
Of course he does. His uniform is too starched and doesn’t feel natural to wear yet. None of this does. So he defers to previous wisdom. Follows the older man, for all it’s worth. Even if there’s a good chance that Jack is the reason he stormed out of that meeting with no resolve at all. All he’d done was suggest maybe Gabe has better thing to do. That he didn’t need to fritter away his time on things like this.    
  
When Jack does find him, hopeless, and frankly a little annoyed, it’s out in the snow, with his back to base, practically biting down on his cigarette and shivering hard. God, he hadn’t even taken his coat. Probably hot-headed enough not to need it.    
  
Jack doesn’t immediately know what to say. He feels like a lightning rod for all arguments in this shade of blue. The embodiment of all the resentment between them.    
  
In a small voice, he uses a word he still knows. “Gabe?”    
  
In a harsh voice, Gabe doesn’t even turn to look at him. “Don’t.” His shoulders are tense with anger. “ _ Leave. _ ”    
  
And Jack knows he used to jump on instruction. But he doesn’t take instruction anymore. So there’s a strange, conflicted sort of conviction in his voice when he says, “Not --not until you tell me what’s going on.” Maybe Jack thinks it’s merciful. A reasonable sort of response. But he’s alone in that.    
  
Gabe makes that perfectly clear with a harsh, single laugh that’s devoid of any mirth. “You really don’t know?!” Then he turns. His head is shaking. His eyes are so --so hurt. There’s respect in him still, from whatever there ever is or was between them, not to hide anything. It’s honest. But it doesn’t make any of this any easier.    
  
Jack’s silence betrays his eyes. Gabe doesn’t wait forever to tell him.    
  
He sniffs hard, and then shakes his head with some sad, pitiful smile like this is all a joke. One that doesn’t bear laughing or repeating. “You know, I only offered to have Blackwatch get involved in any of this so you’d --you’d realise how useful it is.” A steady hand takes the cigarette out of his mouth. Gabe flicks it into the snow despondently. “God, I’m so fucking angry at myself.”    
  
Hollowly attempting humour, Jack says, “That’s good, ‘cause I thought you were angry at  _ me. _ ”   
  
It’s as if Gabe doesn’t hear it. He turns and scrubs at his face in frustration like he’s trying to force himself to see some sense. “I’ve --I had plenty of rookies decide they suddenly didn’t need me anymore. Why should --why should  _ you _ be any different?”    
  
It’s the way he says it. With such disdain. Such hopelessness. Are they really dead in the water? Stepping forward, and trying to breach the insurmountable distance that’s somehow grown between them, Jack tries to say, “Gabe, I--”   
  
He turns on Jack, then. The venom in his eyes. The humanity. “No --this is why you don’t fraternize.” One of his hands comes to point in accusation but forgets itself halfway through the gesture and it’s as if Gabe has nothing left to hold on to. He looks about the snow hopelessly like he’s searching for the wreckage of ‘them’.    
  
Jack looks, too. He sighs into the wind. “Look,” He manages. “If --if there’s a problem, we can all--”   
  
“We?!” Gabe whirls on him again. “Who’s we?! I don’t  _ work  _ with Ana --and I’m not close to any of the others. The only problem here is  _ you _ .”    
  
What can Jack say to that? The only things that occur to him sound like attempts at emancipation, and maybe he does deserve to hear this. It’s true, Gabe doesn’t have what Jack has. The one works with now are new, secreted in. They have no history with him, and in a matter of weeks Gabe has gone from having everything to nothing. But Jack isn’t the one responsible, is he? He never --never asked for any of this.    
  
So, eventually, he manages to say, “I don’t want this to come between us.” He says earnestly. “And I’d never mean to--”   
  
“Oh, spare me!” Gabe hisses, angrily. “You always have such good intentions, don’t you?! But your self-esteem is so fucking wrapped up in what you do.” He sniffs again. His eyes sparkle in a tragic way that shouldn’t be beautiful. “So now you’re the Strike Commander --that’s  _ all _ you are. That’s what you  _ do _ . That’s how you define yourself now.” Then, the accusation that’s been waiting to come. “And you think you’re  _ better _ than me because of it.”    
  
As if on instinct, Jack says, “I don’t--”   
  
“ _ Admit _ it!” Gabe demands of him. He looks so threateningly close to tears. Never did hide himself. Never did make himself responsible for pain caused by others. “Admit it right _ now _ , or I won’t ever be able to look you in the eyes again.”    
  
Gabe’s breaths heave, and they fill the silence. Jack looks at him, but can’t face him for too long. His mouth is dry. He swallows on a throat no bigger than the head of a pin.    
  
“Okay.” He murmurs, eventually, hating every microsecond of it. “Sometimes --sometimes that’s true.”    
  
God, he wishes that were the end of it. That the awful admission would somehow solve things. It’s honesty, isn’t it? It’s what Gabe had been asking for. But it isn’t done that way. No, the admission only makes the pain in Gabe’s eyes flare even worse and he looks away from Jack like he’s trying to spare them both the moment.    
  
How did they get here? It feel as if just moments or hours ago that they were millimetres apart. That Jack knew. He looked away, for an instant, and now Gabriel is a stranger to him, across some vast, insurmountable ocean. A blip on the perceived horizon and nought more.    
  
Overwrought, then, feeling wrong in his bones, Jack comes forward like it will somehow diminish the distance between them. “Gabe.” He tries, again, in a softer voice. “Gabe, you do good work. You’re --you’re useful to all of--”   
  
Gabe looks at him, then. And there’s nothing familiar left.    
  
“I do  _ great _ work.” He spits, furiously, forcing past Jack angrily to go inside. Jack is helpless to watch him go, a flicker of hope flaring in him when Gabe hesitates by the door. “And I’d have been  _ every bit _ the Strike Commander you are, you condescending ass.”    
  
Then he’s gone.    
  
Then he’s gone and Jack stands out in the cold and stares out at the snow. There’s nothing for miles. No signs of life, or friendly lights that bleed yolky yellow as warm as nostalgia. It’s bereft of all signs of breathing and fondness out there. The horizon is invisible. Jack can barely perceive distance at all. He takes it in: the wasteland.    
  
One of his own creation.    
  
-   
  
Heavy-headed, Jesse sighs.    
  
Not out of discomfort. No, for the largest part, he’s at a secure sort of peace, in Ana’s lap as he is, enjoying the feel over her precise hands as she works his hair through her fingertips ritualistically. They’ve done this before --he doesn't recall when or how exactly it started but it calms them both down all the same. But as content as it leaves him feeling, he sighs all the same.    
  
Ana doesn’t seem to notice. Or if she does, she doesn’t think to mention it. This is as distracting to her as it is for Jesse. He thinks it’s because it reminds her of when Fareeha was still a child.    
  
After a few moments more of silence, he opens his eyes and looks up at her, and in a quiet rumble, he calls out, “Miss Ana?” Her eyes find his face. She smiles, faintly, as her ministrations slow. Age is creeping into her face a little. The night of her hair is parting to a thin, grey starlight. “Y’ever have the same dream more than once?”    
  
She pauses to think. Her lips make a line of mystery. “A recurring dream?” Even her voice is soothing. “I don’t think so.”    
  
It’s an answer that Jesse’s happy to accept. And he isn’t the one who presses further, anyway, closing his eyes again. He hasn’t been sleeping well, recently. He’s hoping to make up the rest outside of the dark, when he doesn’t have to drowse quite so deeply. Ana notices, of course, her all-knowing eyes casting a fleet but worried look down at him.    
  
“Is something the matter?” The thumb of her other hand --the one not in his hair, touches his chin gently. “You seem bothered by something.”    
  
His head tilts a little, turning off to the side slightly, moving some of his hair out of his face with his unorganic arm, revealing a tiny scar behind his ear. It has no significance or meaning, but it makes Ana wonder how many more there are. And how many that aren’t visible.    
  
With another light sigh, Jesse murmurs, “Not  _ bothered _ .” He quibbles. “I jus’ --I jus’ wondered if y’thought dreams meant somethin’.” He turns his head again to get a better look at her. His eyes are passive and curious. That much was honesty; he doesn’t  _ look _ bothered at all. “Like if there was a reason behind ‘em, or anythin’ like that.”    
  
It’s a curious notion. Ana herself is more of the skeptic. She hums softly as she considers it, admiring the splint ends of a long length of Jesse’s dark hair. “I’ve not thought about it much.” She shrugs. “I always thought of dreams as a --a random assortment of thoughts, more than anything.”    
  
“Hey,” Jesse huffs out a tired laugh. “Me, too. ‘Least up until a month or so back.”    
  
Ana’s hand stops in his hair. She recalls the folder with Jesse’s name on it. He is none the wiser to any of it.    
  
“Yeah,” He looks up at her again. “Jus’ came outta the blue, but I swear, every night this week, I had real vivid dreams about the, uh--” Then he uses his elbows to sit himself up slightly, cutting his eyes around like he’s conscious of who might be listening. “About the Strike Commander, y’know.”    
  
Ana blinks. One eyes is premature of the other. “What dreams?”    
  
Then, defensive --shy, one of Jesse’s hands scratches the nape of his neck like he’s nervous over something. “Jus’ like --I don’t know.” He coughs out, awkwardly. “You’re right, it don’t mean nothin’, anyway--”   
  
“Jesse.” Firmer, this time. Almost afraid. God, she should be softer to him. To the one who has lost so much without realising it. Blessed are the forgetful, she knows. That these dreams are a strange curiosity to him and nothing more. “Come on.” She tries to sound breezy. “I want to know, now.”    
  
He considers it for a second. Her interest seems to temper his hesitance. “Awright.” He says, eventually, settling back down to rest on her thighs. “Awright, but don’t go repeatin’ this to the Strike Commander --or --or the bossman, neither.”    
  
Ana makes the sign of an ‘x’ over her heart, and that seems to suffice.    
  
“It’s ain’t that excitin’, for the most part.” Jesse’s voice levels out. He sounds distant to it in a cheerful way. “Most a’ the time it’s the same thing. Over an’ over an’  _ over _ . I dream that I wake up, an’ it’s still dark. An’ he’s, uh --he’s standin’ at the foot a’ the bed, undressin’.” Jesse’s words are growing quieter. That cool sort of detachment is fading. “Then he comes over, an’ peels back the sheet, an’ I wake up.”    
  
Cruelly, to herself, Ana wonders how many times that happened. That perhaps it’s a fragment that managed to slip through the cracks.    
  
(That, delirious and helpless as Jesse had been through it all, maybe part of his mind begged to keep some scrap of their union. Something to hold onto, and remember, despite it all. Who knows? Maybe this is it. Maybe he could, after all.)    
  
She holds tighter to him as if her concern and love haven’t already been made afraid. As if her desire to protect him can be made timeless in reverse. “What else?” She asks, even if she fears the answer.    
  
Still at her mercy, Jesse shifts and shrugs. “Sometimes I don’t wake up right away, y’know?” His cheeks colour, vaguely. “I mean, I barely said ten words to th’ guy, and there he is, night after goddamned night, takin’ his clothes off and gettin’ real cosy with me.” At that, he laughs. “Jesus, the first time I woke up convinced I was gonna get written up for it.”    
  
Ana laughs, too. It’s all she can do not to say something she’ll regret. Her hands play with his hair again, longing for simpler times.    
  
After a while, Jesse presses his cheek into her thigh and yawns. “I don’t know.” He murmurs, “Maybe we knew eachother in a past life, or somethin’.”    
  
Wistfully, Ana sighs. “Maybe.”    
  
Then Jesse twists again to look at her. His eyes are peaceful. There’s nothing hiding within the depths of there. The safest eyes, she’s always found --the truest eyes: they’re usually dark brown. “Guess you’re right.” He says, with no particular affection or investment. “Jus’ one a’ those things.”    
  
Her finger traces the scar behind his ear. Her other hand pets his cheek affectionately. “Just one of those things.” She agrees. At least, out loud.    
  
  
-   
  
The transport rattles.    
  
It wakes Jesse up, groggy from the downer he’d taken earlier to get some sleep. It’s torture to try and sleep on these journeys otherwise: the adrenaline of the kill, and the motion of the transport and the anticipation of base otherwise unassailable. Still they wear off, and he comes to wondering how long it is they have left until they touch down.    
  
There’s no natural light to give any indication of passage time. Across from him, still sat upright, is the bossman. He’s still knitting --he does that, sometimes, and it’s practically tripled in length. Jesse’s been out a while, then. A tablet is lit up to Reyes’ right, and he looks over at it occasionally. From the angle, Jesse can’t tell if it’s the knitting pattern or incoming transmissions.   
  
At the back, where there’s enough room for one or two people to lay, he can see where Genji had retired the moment they were extracted. His body is still and untwitching, and it always does Jesse’s soul a bit of good to see the other man at peace.    
  
Yawning, Jesse stretches his back out, and alerts Reyes to his presence in the meanwhile. The prosthetic feels stiff and heavy --he doesn’t suppose he’ll ever get used to it.    
  
“What’s th’ time?” he asks, righting himself, pushing off against the stiffness of the seat.    
  
Reyes doesn’t look back up. “It’ll be about six when we land.” His fingers work easily, and it’s a sight in itself. The bossman himself, shotgun shells still visibly accessible on his belt, working his fingers through pastel yellow wool. “Think we’ll land in a about half an hour.”    
  
“Great.” Jesse says, almost just to say something. There’s an awkwardness between him and the bossman thesedays that never used to be there. A sort of jealousy. He saw it in Iceland. Maybe he knows about Jack --about how even those oppressive glances and practical chaperoning haven’t worked at all. But neither of them are going to say it.    
  
It doesn’t look like Reyes is going to say anything, in fact. His hands work. His face is neutral. Jesse doesn’t much like the atmosphere. “What’cha workin’ on?”   
  
Reyes exhales passively. “A quilt.” The transport rattles again. Jesse lurches forward, but the boss manages to remain unmoved.    
  
Righting himself again, Jesse tries some mirth. “Looks a little small for you.”    
  
Without hesitation, Reyes says. “It’s not finished yet.”    
  
Jesse isn’t shot down so easily. “Not quite your colour, either.”    
  
“It’s not for  _ me _ .” Reyes looks at him, then, and his expression plays at irritation without finding it. As if he wants to be annoyed, but is coming up mostly empty. “It’s a baby quilt.” The moment he says it, Jesse’s opening his mouth to rattle another witticism off, so his hands pause and he says, “Gérard Lacroix. Our man in Berlin. His wife’s expecting.”    
  
With nothing left to mock or really say, Jesse resigns himself to a simple nod. Instead, he’s quiet for a few minutes, picking a little dirt off of his face, thinking about landing. It’s never fun to be cognizant on transport. To have to sit in the silence of it all and think about whatever has just transpired. They don’t do hero’s errands. The less said about it, the better.    
  
Estranged to his own thoughts, Jesse settles to watch Reyes hands work as he knits, fascinated by the expert movement of them. How quick and natural it is. He’s almost tempted to try, watching how the single string that hands from one needle is transformed as if by dexterous magic into a thick, comforting solid, the colour of a childish sunrise.    
  
After a while, unaware that he’s been staring so intently, Jesse’s peace is interrupted by Reyes clearing his throat loudly. “Can I help you with something?”    
  
Coming back to himself, Jesse smiles, sheepishly. “Sorry.” He says, absently. “S’jus’ sorta mesmerizin’ to watch is all.” He leans back and looks back over to Genji, who is still sleeping soundly. “Is it hard?”    
  
Reyes shrugs. “Not really.”    
  
“Oh?” That piques Jesse’s interest. He’s inclined to disagree by the speed and precision of the way the boss’ hands move. “Who taught you?”    
  
Reyes shrugs again. “Nobody.” he says, finishing one row, and moving immediately to do the next. “I taught myself.” His hands still for a second, and he seems to almost stumble back over the information himself. “During the crisis, actually.”    
  
Jesse half-smiles. “Seems like an appropriate response to it.”    
  
Reyes shakes his head. His hands are still paused, as if in through,and he says, “No, it wasn’t --it wasn’t as a way to deal with the stress. It was--...” He looks up at Jesse and his eyes are doleful and serious. “We were covering some ground in Detroit. Total ghost town, then. Omnics had burned it to the ground.” He wets his top lip. “We were in some apartment complex that’d taken heavy fire. Parts were still intact --bodies, that sort of thing.”    
  
That’s when his nature changes. When Reyes’ head dips, ever so softly, and his voice gets all quiet, and almost sad. “In one of ‘em, there was a woman --most of one, anyway, in her bathroom. I just left her how she was, y’know. Couldn’t do much for her.” He lowers the knitting to his lap, and suddenly the pastel yellow seems too harsh a colour.    
  
“I saw in the bedroom, there was an empty crib, and next to it was this blanket. Nice, too; pink and white.” Reyes tilts his head, staring off slightly into the midspace as if he’s still looking at it. “It wasn’t finished, but still --pretty. So I just--...I took it, y’know?”    
  
Jesse swallows. “Why?” He asks, eventually, when Reyes doesn’t speak for a few seconds.    
  
Reyes shrugs, again. He looks a little at a loss. “I don’t really know. I just wanted to finish it. So it could --so it could be of  _ use _ to somebody.” He looks over at Genji and then at the floor. “Didn’t seem right to just leave it lying there.”    
  
It’s sobering. Jesse never hears Jack talk much of that time. Nor of Ana. Like some conspiracy of misery. The more he hears the gladder Jesse is that he was born in those last few years. He’s seen footage and documents. Cities flattened. The earth standing still in once-bustling metropolises, now devoid of life.    
  
He hears Reyes cough, again and looks up to see the other man knitting away again, looking recovered -- the same as he’d been before he’d spoken.    
  
Jesse is still thinking about Detroit. About the pieces of women he’s seen lying in streets or strangled in beds. About the times he’s been the one to put them there, and then he isn’t watching Reyes’ hands or listening to anything. He wonders how much of the dirt on his face is blood. If his face was the last that anybody has seen before it all goes dark.    
  
“Boss,” He murmurs, then, quietly, desperately. “You, uh --you ever wonders, sometimes--...” Chewing his lip, Jesse looks bleakly into the midspace, almost too ashamed to say it. “Y’ever wonder if you’re, uh --if you’re a bad guy?”    
  
Without looking up from what he’s doing, Reyes just says, “No.” Impartial to Jesse’s moral crisis, quiet and small as it is -but present, in all the little ways he wrings his fingers and glances uneasily. It isn’t until he’s genuinely quiet for a little while that Reyes speaks again. “No, I don’t wonder.”    
  
Then he looks up, directly at Jesse --fully, like he wants him to hear this. “World needs bad men, Jesse.” He says, with absolute certainty. “We keep the other bad men in line.”    
  
That old poster occurs to him, then. The Overwatch Myth. Even if Gabe’s face isn’t present amongst the others, he’s still right.    
  
Jesse looks back at him. He nods, after a few seconds. Eased, he’d like to think. It stops him from worrying over the dirt on his face. It gives him that click that liquor sometimes does --that little mechanical click in his head where he doesn’t have to think about where he’s gone and what he’s done and he can surrender himself to the peaceful immediate.    
  
And the immediate is quiet. Jesse has to ask. “What did you do with it?”    
  
Reyes looks up. “With what?”    
  
“The blanket.” Jesse says, quietly. “The one you found.”    
  
“Oh.” Gabe says, then, louder, softer, unravelling his work to admire it. It’s a beautiful quilt, warm and inviting, even if it isn’t finished. “I gave it to Ana.” He explains. “For Fareeha.” It makes him smile, faintly, as he tucks the work away to the side, taking the tablet in its place. Jesse interprets it as a sign that Reyes is done talking, so he leans back, and closes his eyes.    
  
Maybe if he tries he can chase the tail-end effects of the downer and sleep until base instead of sitting waist-deep in his own thoughts. So he props his hat over his eyes and hopes a bit of darkness will aid him --will help him to realise how naturally exhausted his body should be. Would be, even just a few years ago.    
  
He’s something close to sleep when he feels a gentle kick in the shin that catches him off-guard. He lurches forward, again, and his hat drops into his lap as he sits up again.    
  
Reyes is looking at him, again. Unreadable as ever. “What you asked me.” He says, bluntly. “As long as you still wonder if you’re a good man, you are.” He cuts his eyes to the side for a second and Jesse isn’t sure it he’s talking about something else. “People incapable of guilt are the most dangerous.” He looks back to Jesse then. “So long as you have trouble sleeping, you know you’re square. Okay?”    
  
Jesse’s not sure what he’s talking about in its whole entirety. Reyes rarely says anything that doesn’t have the world or some aspect of it pegged. So Jesse nods anyway. “Sure.” He says, granted the peace to attempt sleep a few more times.    
  
He does keep it in mind, though.    
  
He’s sure he’s heard it somewhere before. 


	8. grow fonder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's exam season! i'm dying! let me know if you liked this to distract me from my imminent failures. ten points to whoever can spot the arrival of dramatic irony! 
> 
> just to note that amélie's scene is in explicit reference to her scene in the christmas comic 'reflections'. 
> 
> beta'd again by the one and only grant, whom i love dearly. bc friends, like diamonds, are forever.

In the dark of the hall, Angela recovers.   
  
Her hands come up to her face and she presses down on her eyes to staunch the tears. Her jaw grinds itself shut. She is already sick to death of tears. Her mind cannot bear to hold the image of Jesse. Not tonight --not after what he’s asked her.   
  
She makes her way quietly across the empty, ringing hallways of base. The corridors seem so much bigger than they used to, where once this place was vibrant and alive. Where the paint was fresh and the lights were warm and familiar. Angela’s nostalgia confuses her: this base, and the rest were shut down for a reason.   
  
And Jesse’s memories were taken for a reason.   
  
Maybe it’s best to keep things the way they are. Even if --even if it hurts. Even if, for the twenty years they’ve known eachother, and for all that Angela could call Jesse a friend, she has kept so much from him.   
  
Now the reasons feel foolish and small. Enough time has passed that she has begun to question them. That’s why she’s here, isn’t it? Responding to a call she never thought she’d get. Recalled to base. Returning to arms. The reasons for their disbandment: for the PETRAS act --they seem so small when the world is standing on the edge of another crisis.   
  
Just like the reasons to lie to Jesse seem so strange, now. So cruel.   
  
But a promise is a promise. Even if Jack’s body is cold and in the ground, she can spare him one last grief.   
  
Having covered ground, she goes into the darkness of the old locker room and walks along one wall to try to find hers. Inside is dark, but she cares not for it, or for anything else. She knows what she’s looking for, near the far wall, right at the top. Not hers, but familiar to her. Dried, stuck marigolds decorate the metal exterior of the locker. Old, dry paper notes, of which there were so many more in the past, cling on.   
  
They never did clear out Ana’s locker. How could they? It became a shrine too quickly. A precious remnant. Some pocket of time that comforted them all in some way. To open it up, and see her things arranged as they had always been arranged, proudly awaiting her return was to be able to believe, even for a second, that she’d return.   
  
It’s difficult to say who needed that more after she was gone: Jesse, or Gabriel. Both equally destroyed by it. Gabriel was never the same afterwards --she doesn’t know about Jesse. He left so quickly after it’d happened. Like Ana was the last string keeping him tied to Blackwatch.   
  
The locker besides Ana’s is locked, but Angela remembers her own combination. She turns the dial with the practised ease of a memory, and jerks open the door. The metal whines, as if in protest, and dust scatters about the air, but it opens nonetheless. Her hands feel about in the space there over some journals for the rattiest of them, a battered notebook that’s filled with things that have no particular relevance to her anymore.   
  
She brings it out of the locker, and opens the back page, carefully. The thing is practically falling apart in her hands.   
  
In the back, inside a pocket stuck to the hard outer casing on the inside, she searches through scraps of paper and ticket stubs until she finds it. A still-solid piece of paper that has been barely touched. The print on it is as vibrant and awful as they day she’d been given it. News is almost always worse when it’s given in a written format, you see.   
  
On the card, her teary eyes read over the words once again, and for the last time. Her gift to Fareeha: and the only part she will play in giving Jesse his truth. Printed, and signed, it reads:   
  
_Dear_ **_Miss A Ziegler_ ** _,_ _  
_ _  
_ **_Jesse Avery McCree_ ** _has had_ **_Jack Morrison_ ** _erased from his memory. Please do not mention their relationship to him again._ _  
_ _  
_ _Thank you._   
  
\-   
  
Jack comes to in darkness.   
  
A black so oppressive, no sky dare squeak through.   
Terrible weight crushes him. Hot, soupy wetness marks his face and neck and hands. Pinned as he is, there’s no way to tell if it’s blood. But his body creaks and aches. Fear lights itself up in his body with consciousness. He knows that it is.   
  
Snow had been falling. The Zurich sky had been overcast and moody. They had been shouting, and Gabe, and--...   
  
Oh, Jesus; Gabe.   
  
Panicked, then, trying to feel in the darkness for flesh or warmth or signs of life, Jack tries to talk on a throat stuffed full of dust and debris. Destroyed as he is: deaf from the noise, blind from the eruption, he feels in the dark uselessly.   
  
Above, and besides him, he feels pieces. Warm, but cooling. Familiar. Still.   
  
Jack feels in the absence of his vision. Uses the one free hand he has that’s not pinned in the dark, stifling rubble to grab at a figure he knows.   
  
“Gabe?” He gets out. A fraction of his voice. Destroyed. Ruined barely audible to his own ringing ears. The body does not stir. Does not warm.   
  
In the distance, he thinks he should hear the crackle of flame. Of screams, where instead this deep, underwater sort of silence pervades. There had been a noise --some immense, earth-destroying shatter, and now Jack is stuck blindly in this darkness, feeling at the body nearest to him. He wishes he could find a face with his eyes. Wishes he could see, but all he can do is feel and shake the body nearest him in a desperate and singular fear.   
  
“Gabe?” His voice is so tiny. The only thing audible to himself, and yet so distant. His hand feels over what must be a chest --he can feel the cool expanse of Gabe’s hoodie. It’s dusty, and soaked. Heavy: reeking of iron. He pushes on it uselessly, with all the force he can muster. “Gabe?” He asks again.   
  
But there is no answer.   
  
His face must be bleeding. It only occurs to him as an afterthought as he tries to feel further in the darkness. His hand moves up Gabe’s chest. He can feel no pulse beneath it. No warmth, or life. Nothing --nothing at all.   
  
Jack presses harder. He moves his hand up to the cooling, wet column of Gabe’s throat, and then up to where his face must be. He touches blindly --desperately. Fearful tears sting the darkness in his eyes. Is that Gabe’s face? How can he not tell? It feels different: as if the familiar perfection there has been severed.   
  
“Gabe,” He whispers, again, barely audible, now. “Gabe --please.”   
  
Was it minutes or hours ago that they were speaking? That Gabe’s safe familiar voice had been raised at him, and Jesus, even if he were angry --even if he were livid: Jack had been all Gabe had been thinking of. Is he thinking now? Is he breathing? Terrified by the silence, now, by the darkness: Jack presses harder. Cups the shape of what feels like Gabe’s cheek as some last resort.   
  
“Gabe?” He coughs out. “Gabe, can you hear me?”   
  
His ears ring. There is no movement. No warmth. No other voice.   
  
Jack presses harder. Tears burn his face. It must be torn open. “Gabe.” He says it harder, this time, hissing on a broken voice. “Don’t --don’t do this. Please.”   
  
There is no answer. The blood underneath his hands is cooling. The darkness: growing. His lungs itch and burn with dust, Jack coughs again.   
  
“I-if you can hear me,” His voice is so quiet, now. Almost surrendered to the black, oppressive silence. “If you can hear me, Gabe, I-I--...” His hands shake when they take Gabe’s face again. The one he knows so well without even having to look at. The one he has watched change over the expanse of these last twenty years.   
  
The blood under Jack’s hand is cooling. He cannot conjure any image of Gabriel, torn open, his perfect visage cracked in half by the force of the explosion. Cannot marry the eternal and invincible spring of Gabriel --his Gabriel, with the pale stillness of death. The cold of him --the cooling of the blood: it is more horrifying and close than anything Jack has ever witnessed.   
  
Alone, and he only realises it, then --alone, in that darkness, he holds onto Gabriel’s face still. His heart feels like an anvil. He can barely speak.   
  
Jack does, though. A defiant whisper that crawls its way out of the marrow of his bones, when he’s sure that there is nothing of Gabe left. When he knows it.   
  
Jack has nothing left. “I love you.” he whispers. There is nowhere to go. Nothing to do or say. It is all he has left. “C-can you hear me, Gabe?”   
  
The silence extends. It crushes them all, and the last and least of the resistance --the only force pushing back against it is Jack’s tiny, tiny, voice.   
  
“I love you, Gabe.” He says. There’s nothing else he can say or do. This is all he can do for Gabriel, now. “I-I love you.”   
  
\-   
  
The first rose is red.   
  
Amélie lays it on the cleared patch of earth in front of her, the one darkened by the shadow of the stone. The one that bears his name. She does not have to say his name aloud to remember how it used to taste in her mouth. Was that years ago? Some dull rumour of another life, and another woman?   
  
Red for passion. For beauty and courage. For all that she does not remember.   
  
Sunrise is trying to break through the melancholy ranks of grey cloud that have formed on the horizon, blotting out the Paris sky. Winter here always was magnificent. Her memory that of that much is intact: of the snowfall, of falling down in the banks together, shivering and laughing.   
  
The cold does not occur to her. If anything, her hands feel hot as the other rose she is twisting in her hands cuts her.   
  
The sensation is distracting: she turns her hand, but not quickly enough to prevent a single drop of blood falling from the edge of her hand, where her cut bleeds, onto the snow before the grave. The red is different to that of the rose. Deeper. Darker. There is no passion, or beauty or courage housed within its hue.   
  
It reminds her of why she came, so Amélie crouches again, to lay the last rose next to it.   
  
White: a colour somehow more fragile than the snow itself. Spotless with innocence. She lays it carefully besides the other rose, for a name that appears nowhere in the graveyard. Nowhere but the idea of her memory.   
  
She does not mourn Gérard Lacroix’s wife: a poor, bright girl with the airy grace and poise of a Degas dancer. She does not mourn the eyes she sees in her mirror, every time she is brave enough to look.   
  
The white rose is for the only innocent in all of this.   
  
The one they were going to call Astride, and raise here, in Chatelet. The one that they both had loved without ever meeting, or seeing, or holding.   
  
She would have been beautiful: their daughter.   
  
She would have been. But never was.   
  
Amélie stands, again, and surveys the pair of flowers, clipped suddenly, beautiful as they are but never destined to live forever, at rest on the dark earth of the grave.   
  
And later --far later, when the ghost of a man asks her if she remembers it. If she ever dreams of it, or knows of it any more than what she has been told, Amélie says:   
  
“I remember him. Some of him.”   
  
And after all this time, there is a victory in that.   
  
\-   
  
Three weeks.   
  
Jack doesn’t get to see Jesse for three weeks: twenty-one days, five-hundred and fourteen hours. Not unless it’s glances through observation windows, and in snatched minutes at a time between the other parts of his life pulling at him. Things have continued around base like nothing happened. The world continues to turn, and meetings still proceed and Jack still signs on dotted lines day after day after day.   
  
Jesse is the one who stays still.   
  
Locked in stasis until he’s given the all-clear. God, Jack doesn’t sleep the first week almost at all. His nights stretch out endless like the highway under moonlight, and he finds himself wandering through places they used to sit and talk and kiss and just be. Finds himself rifling through his drawer to find anything that used to belong to Jesse, just to hold it.   
  
On the second night it gets so bad that he overrides the access panel on Jesse’s door to his room. Just to --to be in the other man’s space, modest as it is. Clothes strewn about. A finished carton of grape juice on the nightstand. A shoddily made bed waiting for its owner to return.   
  
(And the sheets still smell like him, too. Like tobacco and sarsaparilla and sweat. Like home.   
  
It’s the only night of rest he gets, at all, lying there in that bed, kidding himself all the while that Jesse is just up to get a drink, or some other meaningless triviality, and he’ll be back soon.   
  
It’s only the once, though. The empty room becomes sad to him by morning, and he cannot resign himself to it again, trying to remain steadfast in some belief that Jesse is only ever a day away.)   
  
After the first week, they let others see him. Not Jack. Not yet.   
  
No, Ana is the first, and goes inside gently, her movements small and patient as if she’s wandering into a lion’s den, where any sudden movements might do them both great harm. Jack watches, from outside, as she comes upon him, slowly. Watches how Jesse mouths something to her, his head hung, sitting there as he is on the bed he now seems to live in.   
  
Then Ana shakes her head. Then she goes over to Jesse, and Jesse cries --Jesus, Jack has never seen the likes of it. His eternal silence, broken at last, and now they all know what he was keeping in. Jesse cries so hard Jack thinks that stars might well have died --thinks the kid will have body bags under his eyes after the onslaught.   
  
And Ana just --she just holds him, there. She strokes his hair and lets him be. And Jack? He has to watch. Is condemned to it. He can’t hold Jesse, though his hands ache and his eyes water and turn the scene into a wobbling photo of grief.   
  
Uselessly, he just --just watches, as she settles him. Until Jesse’s hysteria drains him to the point that he can only cry as small children do; in these staccato, knifelike breaths, trembling and coughing angrily and looking at Ana with enormous and helpless eyes.   
  
Jesse’s settled when Gabe comes joins them. Gabe --who can’t yet meet Jack’s eyes: who seemed most destroyed by what had happened to Jesse. He isn’t like Ana. When he comes inside, he smiles. Lights the kid a cigarette despite the rules, and puts an arm around him. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t force Jesse to speak, either.   
  
They must sit there for an hour, maybe. Jack doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand the passage of time so well anymore. Since they first took Jesse he’s lost his north and can’t find the directions for how to go up. In his mind, the scene lasts forever, overwhelmingly bittersweet as it appears to him. That Jesse is going to be okay: that he’s surrounded by people that care (and that Jack doesn’t get to be one of them, yet).   
  
The scene ends, though. Eventually, after a few cigarettes, Jesse lifts his head and looks Gabe square in the face and says something. Jack can’t hear it. Can’t read Jesse’s mouth well enough to know.   
  
But whatever he says, it’s enough for Gabe to stiffen ever-so-slightly. For him to share this look with Ana --this tragic, stricken sort of look. Then he looks over at the observation mirror, even though he can’t see Jack through the glass, trying to find him as if to communicate something.   
  
He nearly meets Jack’s eyes, too, even if it’s only accidental, before he looks back at Jesse to reply.   
  
He never does find out. Kept in the dark of Jesse’s words as Jesse is kept in the dark of him. They don’t even know what they’re afraid of happening. If something will happen. One-way glass isn’t enough. Forced to spectate: he thinks he might find some peace in looking at Jesse, and Jesse looking back. Just seeing, and being seen.   
  
And when that peace doesn’t come and Jesse’s eyes never find him, Jack starts to think it might be worth it to go inside and set the other man off. Because even if Jesse binds his hands around Jack’s voice and squeezes --god, at least then they’ll be touching.   
  
But Jack sleeps worse after that. Far, far worse. At least, until he can get some news, which comes in the form of Ana, in the early hours of the morning, as she finds him sitting up in the communal kitchen their side of base, stirring a cold cup of tea vacantly. She boils more water and fixes them both something warm and fresh, sitting by his side.   
  
“You look awful.” She tells him, in a neutral tone that makes the remark no less abrupt. “You need to sleep.” What can Jack say? It isn’t like he’s sleepless for lack of trying or wanting. He breathes in the smell of the jasmine tea as Ana takes part of his face with a comforting hand. “Come on. I’ve got some downers you can take. You need to rest.”   
  
Resisting her touch, Jack shakes her off and murmurs, “You know those don’t work for me.”   
  
“What will?” Pragmatic as ever, Ana isn’t hurt by his resistance. She looks at him plainly and waits, as if he can give her an answer. God, if he already knew, wouldn’t he have solved this himself by now?   
  
Jack shrugs, uncomfortably beneath her gaze. He murmurs, “I don’t know.” But he does. He does, so he has to say it. “If I could just --just _see_ him--”   
  
Ana has very little of it. “And then what?” she puts down her cup and looks at Jack again in that blunt, essential sort of way. “You risk him trying to kill you or doing god knows what because you can’t wait for him to recover?”   
  
Those words hurt. A far fucking cry from ‘it’s not your fault’. Jack tries not to think of Jesse when she says those words, not of his marble-gray skin or how he looked in that foil blanket, like some bag full of god.   
  
“Give him time.” Ana says, then. Her voice softening. “He --he needs it.”   
  
“I know.” Jack says, quickly, defensively. “Don’t you think I know that?!”   
  
As ever, Ana lets his pain be felt. She doesn’t snap back at him. Instead, she sighs, gently, melancholy, moving her hand to his thigh to grasp in a motion of solidarity. “This won’t be forever.” She says. “And we’re lucky we found him so quickly. If we hadn’t, I don’t know if he’d be--...”   
  
Jack is less of an optimistic. At least, not right now. “They took his arm.” He says, bitterly. “That’s lucky, is it?”   
  
Steely, then, and almost immediately, Ana tells him, “Lucky is his being here. Breathing.” Her words leave no air or room for disagreement. “That’s enough for most of us.”   
  
She’s right. Lord, when isn’t she? Jack regrets every word he’s ever spoken in the silence that follows the remark. He blinks, tiredly, and thinks of the last time he’d been with Jesse. The morning before he’d been taken, preparing for a routine op, getting dressed in the yolky light of the breaking sunrise as Jack watched from the bed, for once. He’d looked infinite: like a poet. And now? Now--...   
  
Ana seems to sense his pain.   
  
“He asks about you.” She says, after a while. Long enough that it comes as some reprieve from the weight of it all. And the way she says it --lightly. Fondly. The very whisper sort of stills Jack’s heart.   
  
“He does?” He murmurs.   
  
Ana nods. She blinks in the dark of the room and stares off into the midspace. “He doesn’t remember a lot of what happened to him. Not --not consciously.” One of her shoulders stiffens as she says, “I think he asks after you even more than you ask after him.”   
  
Jack laughs, a little. A tiny sort of noise, bubbling up from the feeling of Ana’s words that have crawled into the marrow of his bones and touched the warmth that’s still there. “Yeah?”   
  
Ana laughs, too. “Yes.” She smiles, despite it all. “He --he misses you dearly.” Then her smile fades, and she looks off into some bleak corner of the room. “He doesn’t fully understand why --why he can’t see you.” Her voice hitches a little. “He doesn’t remember all of what they did to him.”   
  
Jack’s smile dies, then, too. He swallows. He feels cold again. “Maybe that’s for the best.”   
  
Ana nods, faintly. “Maybe.” She looks at Jack again, as if monitoring his expression. “But until we know what they did to him, there’s no --there’s no way to tell if the conditioning took.”   
  
Jack only knows what others are willing to tell about what that entails. About Jesse’s memories of them both, together, being made grotesque and monstrous. About how they would have destroyed all the hope in him piece by piece with the torture. Jesse is only human. Even in those few, fatal days, he might have broken. They might have taken Jack away from him as he drowned thinking of those blue eyes: a head in the freakish Atlantic as he dreamed of a colour where bean-green pours over blue like the waters of Nauset.   
  
They’re making progress, he knows. He’s got files of FMRI and therapy transcripts that say as much, even after only two weeks.   
  
Ana swallows again. “He’ll get through this.” She says. “You both will.” The words don’t seem to stick. After a sip of her tea, she leans her head against Jack’s shoulder wistfully and tries to smile. “Who knows? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder.”   
  
Jack smiles, too, faintly; sadly. “If my heart was any fonder,” he says, derisively, “I think I’d die.”   
  
\-   
  
Jesse straightens. He lets out a ragged exhale and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.   
  
It’s late to be in the training hall. Not the way he thought he’d be spending the night, either. But when lunchtime rolled around and Jack’s transport was supposed to have touched down and instead he got a re-route notice, he thought it best to make other plans. Instead of a reunion and a night spent together after _three weeks_ of absence, Jesse is here, wearing himself out on one of those old leather punching bags like he’s seen the bossman do just to get his frustration out.   
  
It’s not Jack he’s frustrated with. It’s the idea of Jack: the title that comes with him, surgically attached. The fact that he’s always in constant demand from about fifty other parties. And then when he goes, and leaves Jesse behind, he can’t even be upset about it. There’s always a good reason: always some new summit to attend or situation to diffuse or something.   
  
So Jack is busy saving the world while Jesse is stuck here, and he doesn’t even have the luxury of feeling sour about it --not after the little over a month that they’ve been seeing eachother in some capacity.   
  
So he stands up straight again and moves the hair from his eyes, tacky with sweat. He sorts his stance out and begins to move, again, mindlessly; automatically. Tries to throw all of his energy behind each movement so that he can leave empty and drained and go straight to a deep and dreamless sleep.   
  
He goes for solid minutes at a time before pausing and wiping at his face and catching his breath, heaving as he is, exhausted by no less restless, staring at the leather and teetering on wistfulness and guilt.   
  
Then he’s bent with his hands on his knees, breathing loudly, thinking of hitting the showers, when a voice from behind alerts him.   
  
“Don’t tell me you’re worn out already, huckleberry.”   
  
Jesse straightens again. He turns, the suspicion of a smile already on his face, and only confirmed by the sight of Jack in the door, looking wearied, but no less fantastic. Then he’s coming into the room in small steps, a bag slung over one shoulder and his other arm by his side, coming up when Jesse strides over to bring him into a kiss. He drops his bag at his feet.   
  
Breathlessly: bursting with affection, Jesse murmurs between kisses, “I thought --you wouldn’t get back ‘til mornin’.”   
  
Beneath his lips, he feels Jack smile, pulling away ever-so-slightly to speak. “Yeah, well.” He says, “I’d say this cuts it pretty close.” Now standing in front of eachother, Jack seems to look him up and down with this light bemusement on his face. “I went down to your quarters and they were empty. Why aren’t you sleeping?”   
  
Jesse shrugs. Almost doesn’t want to admit it. Now Jack is here --actually here, after what sounded like a mess in Gran Mesa. “Couldn’t sleep.” He murmurs. “How --how was the trip?”   
  
Under his gaze, Jack just raises his shoulders and looks away for a second. “The less said the better. “ He sighs, but doesn’t sound too distressed by it, leaning back into Jesse and just enjoying the proximity.   
  
Much the same, Jesse holds him back, his own tiredness catching up with him now, yawning as he grins, “Y’make havin’ your picture taken sound _so_ terrible. What --didn’t they catch your good side?”   
  
In his ear, he hears Jack huff out a breathless laugh. “If PR was just about pictures, I’m sure I’d be fine.” Jack turns his head then and is talking lowly and softly right into Jesse’s ear. “Not exactly what I had in mind when I signed up to join a war, you know?”   
  
His whisper is warm and intimate. Jesse wants to keep on hearing it despite his own fatigue. Despite how he’s covered in sweat and liable to stick to Jack. “Yeah, I get it.” He simpers, “Must be real awful bein’ universally _adored_ .” Laughing, again, he turns to give Jack the best of his smile. “I don’t know how y’manage it.”   
  
Shoving him, gently, and pulling away, Jack looks half-serious when he shrugs. “Life inside the musicbox isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” He shakes his head. “Trust me, I think a lot of people would like to see me crucified.”   
  
Despite the playfulness of his tone, Jesse still pulls back at the words a little to search Jack’s face. After being parted, it’s not exactly what he’d like to hear. “What d’you mean?” He asks, with genuine concern that Jack tries to play off --as he always does.   
  
“It’s --it’s not that serious.” Jack shrugs. “D’you mind if we don’t get into that right now?” It’s said with a keenness Jesse wishes he knew better. But this is new to him --even if Jack isn’t. Since Alaska, and since that night Jack slept on his shoulder, they’ve been kissing in the dark and finding scraps of time for eachother between meetings.   
  
Hell, Jack still doesn’t like Jesse sleeping the night in his quarters, convinced that Ana or Reinhardt or Gabe (God forbid) will burst in at any minute with irrelevant news and catch them together. And it’s not like Jack is embarrassed. More: afraid.   
  
Gabe had said, once, in this wistful sort of way, that he was the same as Jack in the opposite way. That he was the jerk: and Jack was the wimp, and even if no part of them overlapped, they were still just as bad as one another. Jesse sort of gets the meaning, now, even if he’d never dare mention it.   
  
So he doesn’t press, even if he’d like to, content enough as he is just to have Jack here again. Jesse takes it in: the sight of the older man, dressed down, soft to touch and his, for the minute. He drops his head against Jack and sighs.   
  
Whispering, almost embarrassed, he murmurs, “I missed ya.”   
  
Against him, Jack breathes like an ocean at night, powerful and majestic and gentle, all at once. “You did?” He asks. His voice almost sounds curious, like he doesn’t believe it.   
  
Jesse lifts a weary arm to punch gently at Jack’s upper arm. “What, y’didn’t miss me?”   
  
“I didn’t say that!” Jack protests. He sounds tired, but warm and close and Jesse thinks maybe they ought to just pass out here together, on the matt, so they wouldn’t have to part even for a second. It’s what Jesse’s thinking of when Jack says, “Yes, I missed you.” He says, sounding even wearier. “Missed being just Jack, you know? Not having to --to put out fires every five minutes.”   
  
Jesse had never really thought about it like that. He’s never once held any real position of power. Not in Deadlock, that’s for damn sure: even when he was the smartest person in the room, that didn’t mean anybody else had to like him any more for it. Even in Blackwatch, much as he adores the bossman, he’s told where to go and what to do and when to do it until he’s no longer bonded.   
  
He always thought men like Jack could do as they saw fit, and it’s only when Jack sighs again and leans back against Jesse that he realises they’re both bonded, really. The title and the coat and the publicity make for gilded bars and a spacious sort of cage.   
  
But it’s a cage nonetheless.   
  
Then Jack is nosing at his neck and laughing, lightly, “You’re a mess.”   
  
It’s sort of ticklish from what must be a few days without shaving. Jesse jerks into his neck, and smiles just as reflexively. “I didn’t know y’were gonna be back so early. Figured I had time to get a shower, at least.” His arms are still on Jack’s back, keeping them close, standing there in the near-dark. God, Jack’s back is so broad and strong. “So, really.” Jesse says, breathlessly, trying not to be distracted. “This is all your fault.”   
  
Jack looks at him, and then his eyes skirt to the side as he shrugs. “Everything is, thesedays.” But before Jesse can pick apart the comment, he’s moving back into the younger man and kissing him, again, his neck, and behind his ear, tenderly --so fucking tenderly.   
  
Even after some time, Jesse can’t much get past the concept of Jack wanting him like this. Jack --the one on the poster, the physical myth. There’s something about capturing the attentions, not just of one of the most influential and important figures in history right now, a talisman of peace, but also of an older man. That he’s seen so much and done so much but here he is, wanting to be with Jesse. Squandering his precious affections like this.   
  
Jesse doesn’t mind a bit. God, he leans into the touch, moving in tandem with it, responsive rather than assertive, his hands on Jack’s back grabbing fistfuls of shirt for purchase.   
  
“Hmm,” Jack murmurs against him. “Let’s not say another word.” He whispers, quietly, enticingly. “Let’s just--...” He moves to look at Jesse, briefly, inches between their face, his blue eyes darker than a midnight sky as he looks over the younger man’s face for a second, searching for-- what? Permission? Desire?   
  
Whatever it is, he finds it, and then they are kissing, fully, and Jack’s hands are moving to pull Jesse closer, until they are flush against eachother a mess of movement, the both of them desperately trying to explore eachother’s bodies despite the obstacles and the angles. Jack is broad, too, so broad and full and gorgeous that Jesse feels like he might burst at the seams --feels like with their chests pressed together like this, Jack can feel his heart hammering away in his chest.   
  
Somehow, Jack is the first to go down, pulling Jesse on top of him as he lands on the mat. And somehow, in a gesture of submission, Jack stays beneath him, looking up at him with those dark, mysterious eyes, waiting for something. It’s not like Jesse can’t read the subtext, but they’ve not gone beyond gentle hands and hot mouths before, and here, of all places, in the training hall, on the matts, is hardly how he pictures Jack would want this to be.   
  
But Christ, the idea of it. Jesse’s mouth is nearly watering at the prospect.   
  
“A-are y’sure--” Jesse whispers.   
  
Jack kisses him again as if to stop him. “I just spent three weeks with everybody in a fifty mile radius looking to me for instruction.” He says, raggedly: hotly. “Make this easy for me.”     
  
Jesse leans down into the touch again. His arms are practically weak from the feeling of it. From how practised and masterful Jack is when he nips right beneath Jesse’s ear and makes this noise in his chest like he’s hungry for more. Jesse doesn’t think he could get any harder, and maybe that’s why in a moment of absolute stupidity, he murmurs,  “B-but --but _here_ ?”   
  
“Here.” Jack confirms for him, just as breathlessly, just as hard, lifting his hips to grind up against Jesse. God, he sounds practically ravenous when he grinds out. “Now.” God, Jesse thinks he must be hallucinating until Jack pulls him down again and whispers right into his ear. “ _Now_ , Jess.”   
  
_Jess_ . He’s never heard that before. Not from anyone.   
  
So he lets out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding and smirks. “Yessir.” He says.   
  
They kiss for forever, and that’s Jesse’s fault. Could kiss all day and never get tired of it, and in the end it’s Jack who works Jesse’s pants down. Who asks for it again, without saying anything, and then in the middle of the night in the dark of the training hall, Jesse is working Jack open with his spit-slick fingers while the older man stuffs his hands over his mouth to muffle his noise, his cock red and gorgeous against his stomach.   
  
They fuck there, on the floor, too, with Jesse’s fingers in Jack’s mouth and his own mouth biting hard on Jack’s neck to keep them both quiet as he ruts and thrusts and breaths hot and hard and ragged, Jack hot and open beneath him, sucking hard on those fingers and making the most obscene noises. Jesse’s ears are hot by the time he cums. His face is red and he’d got no air left in him and he can barely process any of it.   
  
Jack’s not long after, gasping out, thrilled and tender.   
  
It’s so surreal during that when it’s over, and Jesse is still inside of him, trying to catch his breath, realising where he is and what’s actually happened, he isn’t sure what to say and do. It’s only now the fatigue is really hitting him: like a southbound freight train, and then he doesn’t even want to pull out or move off of Jack at all, but just stay there and sleep.   
  
As ever, it’s not that easy, as Jack gently rolls them their sides so they can better spoon. He’s also catching his breath, and they lay in silence for a while.   
  
In the dark of the room, Jesse stares at the back of Jack’s head in a sort of wonderment. The blonde is lightening. Maybe in a year or two, real prominent whispers of gray will advance. He doesn’t think he’s seen another person in his entire life he is more mesmerised by.   
  
Even more so when the silence breaks, and Jack is leaning away from him, managing to reach the bag he’d dropped when he first came in. “Nearly forgot.” He whispers, sounding drowsy, rummaging around inside it for a few seconds before coming up with something Jesse can’t yet see. “This is for you.” Jack yawns. “For your locker.”   
  
He passes it over his shoulder. It’s a small --tiny, in fact, box, and for a brief, silly second, Jesse mistakes it in the dim light for a ring box. It isn’t, of course, and the hand that isn't trapped beneath Jack, he pries it open to get a look at what’s inside.   
  
Something glistening in the dim. Small and familiar.   
  
“A bullet?” Jesse asks aloud, sounding crass and unimpressed. “It’s, uh --lovely, but--”   
  
“Read the bottom of it.” Jack says, quickly. So he does just that, taking the bullet out of the box, and nearly dropping it in the process, before turning it around to look at the bottom, where he can see the words ‘colt’ and ‘.45’. It stuns him, a little. He swallows.   
  
“This real?” He asks, in a small voice.   
  
Jack just huffs out a laugh. “It better be.” He yawns once more and turns to get a better look at Jesse, smiling sleepily. “Saw it and made me think of you. Thought you might like it.”   
  
Jesse doesn’t look at Jack right away. Keeps his eyes on the faint gold-colour of the casing in amazement. “I do.” He murmurs, after a while, finally looking back up at the older man. “I really do.”   
  
Leaning over, he kisses Jack softly on the cheek and holds him closer. In his whole life, Jesse can count the gifts he’s been given on one hand. And maybe it’s just the moment or the relief of seeing Jack or all sorts of other reasons, but in this moment, the coy glimmer of the metal in the dark seems to supersede everything else anyone has ever given him.   
  
He places it back into the box and places it down by his side, content, for now, just to close his eyes. He won’t let himself fall asleep here, but a few minutes of peace --well, that’d do fine.   
  
Drowsy himself, then, he leans against Jack and murmurs, “Y’know, y’got a funny idea of romantic.”   
  
And without missing a beat, Jack mumbles back, “So they tell me.”


	9. two masters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wassup hoes remember me?
> 
> this is my favourite of all my works so if u feedback hard enough u can definitely revive it!! 
> 
> (also me?? procrastinating from spare parts??? never!!!)

Blood. Jesse comes back to himself suddenly.  
  
Poppy blood like slander on familiar lips. The handle of the knife in his grip. A gasp as if for air or apology: abducted by a pierced lung.  
  
Blue eyes. Home, asking him something.  
  
_Jesse?_  
  
There’s blood on his fingers. In the meadowlark. Specked on the pale of a cheek now, in two knifelike coughs, as blue eyes stare above, blank in their confusion and utter betrayal.  
  
_Jesse?_  
  
-  
  
  
Evening comes as a surrender.  
  
And none join hearts and hands to commiserate together.  
  
On the other side of base, Jesse is sleeping off the procedure. On this side, Gabe drinks, and tells himself that maybe if he drinks enough, maybe he can forget about all of this misery, too. He can’t stand to face Ana right now, and least of all Jack. They’d just end up talking --and they’ve talked enough, haven’t they? Talked in circles and the ending is still the same.  
  
A cigarette is burning in the ashtray on the table, filling the room slowly with a gentle layer of smoke. It’s almost pacifying, softening the light of the television that Gabe is only half-paying attention to. His thoughts are intangible and abstract. Every time he looks away he swears he can see Jesse on the screen, looking how he had only hour ago --bright with tears and reckless misery.  
  
But then he shifts his gaze, and there’s nothing there. Just a suspicion, and nought more.  
  
It’s just a trick, he knows. Used to get them after the crisis. Never thought something like this would feel the same way. That all these years later and given how much more he knows, he’s still useless to those who need him.  
  
But the room is smoky and quiet, and he knows Jesse is at peace, now: resting. Recovering. The ice in his drink is mostly melted and the very glass chills his lip to touch. He’ll finish the bottle he opened, and then get that click in his head where his thoughts get all quiet, and maybe then --just maybe, then he’ll be able to sleep dreamlessly, haunted by no apparition.  
  
He thinks he only imagines the knock at the door when he hears it. That some awful corner of his mind would drag the idea of Jesse here, and now. So he makes no move to answer it.  
  
Until it comes again. Firmer.  
  
Gabe has lived through so much --seen cities levelled and hundreds of young men die in their beds and children wandering around in rubble, shoeless, bloody and lost. Why does the back of the door give him such pause? Why is it that he fears so suddenly what could be on the other side?  
  
Sick, then --suddenly sick to his stomach on the acid of his drink, he staggers to his feet and passes through the faint fog of the cigarette. He pauses at the threshold of the door. He swallows. He opens it.  
  
It’s been a long time since Jack was at his door. Even longer that he’s here, like this, no coat or bells or whistles. Tired and unhappy, under cover of darkness, standing out in the hall like he’s lost.  
  
Even to witness the other man fills Gabe with something --anger? Regret? That he wants to blame Jack for all this misery when it’s as much his fault, too. There stands his mirror, his perfect foil, looking grey and pathetic and human: so fucking human. Gabe can barely stand to meet his eyes, and instead opts to look down at the bottle Jack is holding in a lax wrist by his side, the other busy with a hefty stack of paper.  He must have knocked with the bottle.  
  
Gabe bristles. “If you’re here for sympathy--”  
  
Jack doesn’t hear it. Inertly, with an airlessness to him, he pushes past Gabe’s body in the door and steps inside. His voice is destroyed when he speaks, in a way Gabe never gets to hear. Like he’s swallowed an avalanche. Like he’s been crying. “There’s work to do.”    
  
How can he argue? To even hear the way he sounds reaches a place Gabe thought he’d amputated. That, even here and even now, he feels for Jack (and of all the stupid things a man could feel: remorse. Compassion). He closes the door, then, and turns back to face the room: the evidence of his own grief. The cigarette burning in the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table. His glass next to it, casting shadows by the light of the television. Pills arranged in haphazard circle.  
  
They won’t work for him. But they’re there, nonetheless.  
  
Jack has already taken a seat, placing the papers on some empty section of the coffee table. He is sitting unnaturally upright. His expression is sallow and vacant. The television light makes him look overexposed, like an x-ray of a man. Leaning forward, he takes about half of the papers, indicated by a red tab in the middle, and holds them towards Gabe wordlessly. So much the better: his voice is so painful to listen to, and gabe is sick to death of hot salt.  
  
“What’s this?” He asks, brusquely, as he takes the papers, scanning the first page passively, before it dawns on him. It’s a transcript from an interview from one of Gabe’s men. “This hearing isn’t until next week.” He says. He surrenders the paper to the desk and picks up his glass again.  
  
Then Jack picks it up, again, and holds it out to him. “You need to read it.” He whispers.  
  
Mercilessly, Gabe takes the stack out of his hand and puts it on the table again, but this time with a cruel amount of force, enough to make a thump. God, but Jack doesn’t flinch. His gaze doesn’t shift, either. How empty it looks, the depths of his eyes holding an unnerving stillness like compasses that can no longer point to anything. “I’m not doing this tonight. Not when--”  
  
“Please.” Jack sounds like an inch of a man. Like the tiniest stip of moonlight in a shirt. His eyes blink, one prematurely of the other, red and sorry-looking. “Please, just--...” With a shaky sigh, he manages to look at Gabe, then, which is all the worse. “Just do it.”  
  
And here, Gabe thought Jack had enough mercy on himself for the both of them. Never thought that on a night like this, with his heart like this, he still finds it in him, somehow, to move his hand. To hate every convulsive twist of his gut as he picks the paper up. To make this easy for Jack, despite it all.  
  
The mercy is tempered by the guilt he feels, and the accusation. He reads, sure. But he has to say it.  
  
“What’s it say,” he begins, without looking at Jack, still staring at the first page, “that three hours ago that kid was _begging_ me to look after you. To make sure you _‘got through this okay_ ’.” He chances a look at Jack --who is looking at the paper intensely. Whose grief is evident, but somehow not enough. “And you’re here just now. To _work_.”    
  
Jack doesn’t hear it, it seems. He just reads over the paper, inertly.  
  
That’s what hurt the most, he thinks, all those years ago. What he’d let destroy him for so long. Thought that Jack was aloof and proud, that he didn’t care. That it had been easy for him. It was only years later, and even now, that Gabe is coming to realise this is what Jack does. That his grief is a strange and different creature: one that Jack swallows. One that kills him quietly and silently.  
  
It’s a punishment. Jack doesn’t care if he survives this. In fact, it would be a mercy if the grief killed him, just so he wouldn’t have to see Jesse again, his eyes all vacant and unknowing, sweet and brilliant and brave. So he wouldn’t have to live with Jesse’s ghost.  
  
In the veil of great surprises, as Gabe watches Jack read, he wonders, selfishly --foolishly: did Jack ever even love _him_ at all?  
  
His insides feel like dishwater. Distant pains throb under newer ones. He reaches for his glass as Jack does, and they share some sort of look as Jack drinks, swallowing with a little difficulty, before extending the glass towards Gabe, watching him carefully.  
  
Holding it out even as Gabe takes the bottle from the table, and drinks from that instead.  
  
Jack watches that, too. Lets out some tragic whisper --some attempt at a laugh as he murmurs. “You can’t even stand drinking out of the same glass as me, can you?”  
  
Gabe puts down the bottle. He makes it to the second page. “You shouldn’t have come here.” He says, eventually. Distracts himself with the next page.  
  
Jack doesn’t say anything by which to reply. Silent but for the television, they work like that. It’s soothing in it’s own way: the distraction. The scene of it is reminiscent to years before, when they’d work like this, together, sat shoulder-to-shoulder, touching absently and lovingly. Now the distance between them is careful and deliberate.  
  
Now, Jack looks translucent by the television light, more grey than blonde. Looks no further from tears than he did before. At some point, he reaches into his shirt pocket and looks down at something in his hands --something small, and metal. It shines in the light delicately.  
  
Gabe doesn’t ask. He knows the process. Knows they would have taken everything from Jesse that wouldn’t make sense to him when he woke. That, now his room will be purged of all evidence, just like his mind. In the end, he doesn’t have to ask. Jack puts it on the desk by his glass --of all the things to fiddle with, it’s some tiny, shining bullet.    
  
Thinking about it, and watching Jack, Gabe murmurs, “I thought about erasing you.” He searches for the words. “A couple of times, actually.”  
  
Jack looks at him. Looks tired. So goddamn tired. “So why didn’t you?”  
  
The question surprises him. Of all the times he’s thought about it --signed off on his own men who need confidential data scrubbed from their memories or just the sight of something that haunts them too deeply to persist with: something stops him. Maybe he’s just sentimental: that he wants to hold on to the concept of the man he’d loved --fully loved. Maybe he’s just a coward.  
  
“I don’t know.” Gabe says, eventually.  
  
But he does know: he knows that if he erased everything between him and Jack he would fall for the man again.  
  
And he doesn’t think he’d survive it a second time.  
  
Instead, he says, “There were some good parts.”  
  
That makes Jack lift his head. By the light of the TV, his mouth makes this almost imperceptible movement --some attempt at a smile for the first time since he’s arrived. The first time in hours and days and weeks, maybe. There’s such pain and fondness in his eyes, and to look at him, Gabe’s heart is full to the brim like a landfill.  
  
“There were.” Jack says.  
  
-  
  
“Still her.” O’Deorain’s instruction is simple.  
  
Amélie had brown eyes, once. Dark and full of this strange, light energy. Restrained but strong, elegant as a Degas’ dancer. Brown, no longer. Poised no longer --fearful, hateful. Yellow and bright as some celestial body, finally breaking down, collapsing in on itself in some bright and tragic end. A supernova of tragedy, and he witnesses it alone as he holds her.  
  
Not by any more measure than a hand on her wrist. Bound to the bed as they are. The gesture is something --comforting? Useful?  
  
She doesn’t remember Gabriel Reyes any more than she can remember the killing, or the extraction. Her mind is empty of everything but the body --his body. The baby. The weight of it all. That’s the ultimate cruelty of this, isn’t it? That they spent so much time rewriting her story inside: crossing all the right wires to create some silent, ticking bomb of a sleeper agent.  
  
But leaving her otherwise intact: her regret. Her confusion. Her emotion.  
  
They’d done the same to Jesse, too. But they never did this.  
  
The electrodes fix at either side of her temples. There are tears escaping absently down the side of her face. Resigned, now, knowing that with him above her, Amélie has no chance or desire of escape. It’s quick --that’s all she’s been told. The pain is quick and instance, but subsides to a peaceful, comfortable numb.  
  
O’Deorain presents it like a mercy. Like she wants to absolve Amélie of her sins by taking her every last feeling, and not that her finest and most successful work would be wasted if left untreated, bleeding out in a bathroom, unable to stand the living any longer.  
  
The remaining memories will stay. There will be no history to them --no remorse or love or emotion to attach to them. Liberating. Harrowing.  
  
At least this time, she’d asked.  
  
O’Deorain’s hand hesitates by the switch. Amélie is looking up at him again. Right at him as she continues to cry. And he thinks of brown eyes, but not hers. Innocence sundered, but not hers. Thinks of that damn passage, all over again, as the switch flips and the woman below him _screams_.  
  
Blessed are the forgetful. They get the better of even their blunders.  
  
-  
  
  
Jack comes in from the cold with ice still on his shoes. Feels colder than when he was outside.  
  
He stamps a few times to clean his feet, heaving a sigh. Feeling hurt, of all things, and by what? Jesse is still out there, smoking away happily. It would be so easy to rejoin him. To stand the bitterness of the Icelandic winter and watch the nothern lights together, like it’s the first time he’s witnessing them. Like it’s the first time--...  
  
His shirt smells faintly of cigarettes. Jack thought he quit: but smoking isn’t the only old habit he can’t seem to shake tonight.  
  
He doesn’t even think anything of it, until he turns the sharp corner away from the exterior door, and nearly falls right over --and into, Gabe. It happens suddenly, and while he’s quick, his nerves flare through the dam roof as he staggers backward, hand-over-heart, attempting a recovery while Gabriel looks wholly and entirely unmoved. Like he always does, thesedays, holding some lean by the wall like he’s been --been waiting here.  
  
Jack doesn’t like that thought a whole lot. There’s a lot about tonight he doesn’t like.  
  
After a few seconds, he tries to manage some geniality. They’re old friends, still --right? Or maybe Jack’s just been seduced by the easy and nostalgic nature of sharing a cigarette. Friends is ambitious, he knows. There’s too much on Gabe’s sleeves that’s been all about the both of them, recently.  
  
Time to pretend, then. “Jesus,” Jack says, lightly. He think about making a joke, but then he notices how Gabe’s looking at him.  
  
He thinks about bed linens. Apologies. Forgetting. Thinks about Alaska and northern lights and the blank-eyes sort of smile Jesse was just giving him.  
  
God, who are they fooling? That’s not Jesse. Not really. Just a few --a few ripples of him. Some lingering thing. There’s no history to him. No fondness. He doesn’t even know who he is. It’s been months. Jack had thought maybe he had himself fooled: that it didn’t bother him, and he could handle this version of events.  
  
But it’s there in the back of his throat. The telltale itch to speak. To grab and shake and ask, ‘ _didn’t you manage to hold on to anything of it?_ ’.  
  
“Cold night.”  He can’t think when Gabe speaks. Like a lightning rod through a cloudy sky. It’s always been that way, only, it had once been exciting. Now it sounds hard. Accusatory. “Not the sort to stay out in.”  
  
Jack’s head tilts. He swallows. He straightens. What should he have to hide? What job of it is his to protect Gabe from his own jealousy? “Were you --waiting for me?” He squints.  
  
Gabe shrugs. Always quick to slip the net. It’s almost believable, the way he does it, too. “For whichever of you came out first.” He pushes up off the wall and stands, like that will make his point clearer. There’s no intimidation to be found in the wake of what’s already happened. There’s nothing else that can be taken. “You took your time.”  
  
Jack bristles. Wants to parry the accusation: say there’s a reason for it beyond just wanting to be near Jesse again. Being able to stand with him and pretend. But he can’t, so he says, “It’s none of your concern how much time I spend doing anything.” He shakes his head. “Run along.”  
  
Mistake: he can see it in the way Gabe’s wrists show their tendons as he curls and uncurls his fists with a laugh of disbelief. “Oh?” He huffs, sharply. “Is this a joke to you?” Jack notes how he pulls himself together, draws himself up tall to make his big accusation. “Or do you want him to lose the other ar--”  
  
“ _Don’t._ ” Jack’s arm flinches. He thinks he’ll do something he knows he’ll regret if Gabe says even just one more word. Instead, he tries to control himself. Tries not to think of Jesse’s resting form in the bed. The machines and the wires that made a mess of the vigil in Jack’s intentions. The same with the stitches on his arm in the mostly-healed wound. “Don’t you _dare_.”  
  
He could cry for that. He won’t. Never could for Gabe’s sake, if that’s what he’s after now. What does Gabe care? Why shouldn’t he make it personal? Jesse was in pieces in the day after --after--...and now Gabe will do anything to protect that boy: which includes keeping Jack on the other side of the universe if need be. The other side of that vast and wise and white wasteland.  
  
He makes that much damn clear. Makes his voice low to say, “Once was enough.” Says it like spitting down at the ground in front of Jack. Cursing him, full of vitriol and hate and jealous and something precious, squandered. Jack is only reminded of that in this ever-so-slight softening. In the way Gabe can’t stand to look at him when he sighs. “This isn’t good for --for _either_ of you.”  
  
“Jesus,” Jack says again. A prayer. Some admission of hopelessness to a myth. “Don’t you think I know--”  
  
Gabe cuts through him. “Then explain it to me.” He folds his arms across his chest. Looks at Jack like he’s done before --waiting on some excuse, some external fault that doesn’t lie within Jack. It’s never his fault, it seems, a pack of blessings light upon his back that never fails to remain weightless. “Explain it to me.” He grinds out. “Did you --did you just want a cigarette _that_ badly?”  
  
Jack hates the taste of tobacco in his mouth, now. Hates the cold still lingering on some of the places of his face. He doesn’t want to say it out loud. He won’t. He’ll say something else. “It’s not my fault if he wants to--”  
  
With Gabe, of course, he has nowhere to hide. “Not your fault?” Gabe’s voice is quiet, now, though --not the sudden burst of thunder it should be, but hurt personally,shocked to some inner-circle by the insinuation. Jack’s intention isn’t to shirt this to Jesse. The kid asked for nothing --never did, only ever gave. Only ever lost. “You think it’s _his_?!”  
  
Jack’s chest seizes. “That’s not what I said.” He snaps, furiously. “I never said that--”  
  
“Then what _are_ you saying?” Gabe sounds so --so fucking calm, despite the investment. Despite how Jesse is the only one left not holding a piece of his mind in the rubble of all this even under Gabe’s care.  
  
Jack is too wrought to see the trap before him. He nods, helplessly. “I only wanted--”  
  
There it is. Gabe huffs out a mirthless laugh. He shakes his head and sees Jack exactly where he is. “And you just do what you want.” He says, bitterly. Something that’s been festering in him for a long damn time; something that finally has words. “Don’t you, Jack?”  
  
Then Gabe’s crusade of selfless accusation seems to fall flat. Then it no longer becomes about the kid crying in a hospital gown, hours before they came to rob him blind. No longer about the torture, and the arm, and the things left unsaid between all of them. No longer about Jesse at all, in all of his forgetfulness.  
  
And he wants to speak against it--to ask, ‘ _does Gabe have the slightest idea how it feels to be even near Jesse: to feel his stirrings, to walk past him in corridors, and to hear him laugh in rooms Jack has no place in, and to have him look at Jack now with absolute blankness? Does he know how it is to lose someone so completely, and to have them so near?_ ’  
  
But then, he doesn’t speak. Not when he realises that Gabe does know that pain. In some way.  
  
Not when Gabe looks at him hard and suddenly and says, quieter now, all the worse for it, “Stay _away_ from Jesse.”  
  
And Gabe never gives orders. Never wanted to be the one on that side of the gun. Jesus, even after everything, he never asked for a single thing: not a bit or sorrow or sympathy or even respect. He’s pretended to be content with his lot and his laws of silence for all this time, but this --this is the thing that breaks him. Turns his voice to the blade of a knife. Makes the sentence law.  
  
Is that how he sees this? Jack, as his boy’s greatest threat? That he’s just --just washing his hands, perpetually, and not drinking in the dark, or going over old pictures he shouldn’t even own or staying out in the cold of the night to catch a glimpse of an ethereal green light he’d once seen in eyes full of adoration?  
  
Jack has nothing to say.  
  
For the first time, he thinks, there’s some splinter. A crack in a part of Jack, taking on water, growing heavier in it’s weight that will bloom to a suspicion, and then a doubt. _What did I do to him? To them both?_  
  
_Will I do it again?_  
  
He never speaks, the coward’s errand, and Gabe leaves him with that. Always was good at leaving wounds to fester. Turns and goes with his orders perfectly clear, and Jack remains there, uselessly, caught between the northern lights and a future that looks the same as watching the rear-view mirror.  
  
He never did hear the door shut: quietly, quietly.  
  
Never did feel Jesse, on the other side of the corner, pressed against the wall, equally torn. Nobody but Jesse knows what he’s heard of Gabe’s commandment. Nobody will ever know, and so he has to reason with himself.  
  
Jesse has the cold in his bones. Knows that Gabe is above all things to him. But belief is as flexible as morality, and as he stays, frozen, afraid to move and fraternise but equally afraid to stay and live with regret, he doesn’t realise Jack is in the same place.  
  
Both of them know this dance of serving two masters.  
  
But only one of them can remember it.

  
  
-  
  
Maybe there’s some stock to what Ana says. About absence, and fondness, and the heart of it all, or something.  
  
That, after the seven weeks it takes, of the others coming and going gently: of rehabilitation and therapists and extensive toxicology and neurology and prosthetic crafting and fitting and physio --after all of that distance and the tensions of it all, when Jack finally steps into that harbour of a room, he finds his anchor immediately.  
  
Jesse’s eyes on him.  
  
Jesse’s form, in his vision. No veil or separating pane of glass. No attendant in there with them. The air between them is as naked and still as the silence, and for Jack? It is painfully intimate.  
  
The kid is sat with his hands chained to the table. One of his own hands, anyway. The other is still new to Jack. Still strange. Some piece of metalwork playing at a picture of where an old tattoo was, and how the whole thing shines. Jesse hasn’t pulled his sleeve down around it. Maybe he can’t. It’s wider, by a hair or so, that his flesh-and-blood arm.  
  
Jack doesn’t know. It bothers him, that he doesn’t know.  
  
They’d told him some things, before he’d come in. About slow, unsudden movements, and to avoid contact. That Jesse had been the one to ask for the cuffs himself. Scared, Ana had said --terrified out of his mind that something would happen. There’s still no clear ending to the story of the conditioning. Not of what they were trying to achieve or with who, beyond Jack.  
  
But Jesse is looking up at him. Taking in every line on his face with this deep sort of wonder Jack knows. The kind that mirrors when he sees something new. He saw it best in those brown eyes in Alaska: the northern lights turning the irises to green and then to purple. Like Jack is this wild and incredible phenomenon, contained, somehow, in the sterile little room.  
  
Jack thinks his face hurts. Thinks it might be from smiling, or from holding himself in perfect passivity.  
  
Jesse looks --jesus.  
  
Jesse looks like he did before. The shock of the incident has dulled, now. The signs of it are harder to spot. There are tension in him that have eased. He sits easier. His face is still sharper than Jack had once known it, but not so severe as when they’d first brought him in, this match-stick figure boy, mutilated, catatonic hunched and shivering. His broadness is returning to him. Hair still growing back, but healthier, longer than regulation but still not quite restored.  
  
The best he’s looked in so long that once Jack’s eyes are on him, he can’t tear them away.  
  
“I been askin’ after you.” Jesse says, eventually. Playfully --even if his voice is soft with this latent excitement, but hard enough still that Jack knows it’s said empathically.  
  
“I heard.” He says. Turns his step to curve towards where Jesse is.  
  
Sits down.  
  
The moment he does, the flesh and blood hand Jesse still has moves forward, purposefully, slowly so as not to alarm anybody, the chain on the table rattling until he can grasp one of Jack’s. Just the fingertips, a faint thing, but there nonetheless: warm and careful in it’s ministrations. The simplest brush of Jack’s knuckles.  
  
When Jesse lifts up his head again his eyes are shining. His voice has changed when he next speaks, like he’s having to get it around this wet wad of emotion that’s balled up in his throat, devastating his usual cool and easy nature. “Hey,” he whispers, squeezing his hand.  
  
Jack doesn’t even think before he squeezes back. “Hey.”  
  
He thinks maybe it’s just him --that he’s failing them both by feeling so suddenly overtaken by the surge of fondness and regret and sorrow and joy all at once, but then he can see that stifled stillness in Jesse’s posture that gives way to a tremble. The glistening of his eyes. The kid is somehow smiling throughout. “I told you I’d be fine.”  
  
He would try to make light of this, wouldn’t he? Try to pull Jack out of his own head like he always does.  
  
Does? Did?  
  
Then there’s the scrape of chair legs on floor and in a second, Jack is up, leant as far as he can go across the table, his arms thrown around Jesse. It’s a careless fucking act, but he doesn’t care. The touch of Jesse’s hand had been a crack in the stone wall. Seven weeks. Seven weeks without so much as an incidental brush against one another and Jack can’t stand it any longer.  
  
The speed of it frightens Jesse. Jack can feel it --how the kid tenses up, afraid of his own shadow. It takes him a good few seconds to let go of that caution. But he does. He does: he relaxes into it, gently, slowly. He finds his way back home, even within the confines of that gesture alone.  
  
The chain is too short for him to reach up and return the embrace. The best he can do is lean his head against Jack and close his eyes, fearfully, as Jack’s mouth opens and every fear and paranoid notion and sentiment of devotion that he’s kept solely to himself spills out in regular form.  
  
“You _idiot_ ,” He murmurs, wetly, stroking over the familiar planes of his own home. “You fucking idiot, don’t you _ever_ \--ever leave--...”  
  
And all the while, Jesse is nosing at him, nodding, his voice a wreck. “It’s awright,” He keeps saying, even with his prosthesis glistening in the light, and the chains around his hands, and the sharpness of his collarbone digging into Jack. “It’s awright.” He keeps on, “I --I’m awright.”  
  
But he’s not. He’s not, and Jack won’t let go of him he can bear to believe the lie. He shuts his own eyes. Breathe in the smell of harsh soap in Jesse’s hair. “I’m sorry.” He says. God, he’s wanted to say it for so long that it’s put down roots in his chest, anchored there forever. “I’m so sorry,” He strokes a hand over the back of Jesse’s skull and tries to pull him a bit closer, wants to apologise for every single breath his boy has had to draw in suffering. “I never --never should’ve--”  
  
Jesse’s voice is an exhale, attempting at playful, strained by something invisible. “Don’t take all the credit.” He murmurs,, chains rattling like he’s trying to return Jack’s embrace. They seem so --so decorative at this point. Jack doesn’t think there’s a thing on this earth that could have him fear Jesse. Not a thing he wouldn’t forgive, or tolerate, or learn to love, even as Jesse contradicts his very apology with, “Easy, there.”  
  
Seven weeks was a long and hard enough chain. Jack doesn’t think he can convince himself to let go. So much for not scaring the kid. For not overwhelming him, or making matters any worse.  
  
God, he’d been so convinced, and maybe some part of him still is, that all of the work done would amount to nothing. That the damage was done, and to see Jack, the target of all of that manipulation for Jesse --to see him, this close and this real would trigger something. Jack doesn’t know what. Doesn’t know, and none of them do, how deep the root of it all is, or what the intended outcome is.  
  
There were a lot of ideas thrown around. _Sleeper agent. Assassinate._  
  
Worst of all: _clean wipe_ . After all, what harm could the kid do, if he didn’t remember the conditioning? Didn’t remember anything about Jack, at all?  
  
Jack doesn’t know whose interests he was protecting when he shot that down. Tried to bury it. They already took his arm, for god’s sakes. He wouldn’t have them take the stars out of Jesse’s eyes when he looks at Jack, or that way he noses into familiarity like a much smaller creature. Wouldn’t lose this for the world.  
  
They’re kissing, then, the distance too much to bear. Jesse is still held back in some way: resistant and fearful, but desperate to be affectionate. To hold on to the moment he’s been promised for weeks: the one he’s wanted so ardently, and feared so terribly that’s happening, now, as Jack kisses over his eyes and across his cheeks and everywhere but his lips as if that’s some watershed they won’t be able to balance on.  
  
And it’s so painful and familiar and boundless that Jesse doesn’t know if it’s really real. He keeps waiting for something to happen. The reinforcement of water cure or his arm, or something worse to condition the stimulus. But nothing comes, and Jack sustains him like water. Murmurs to him, when he has no breath left, “Don’t you ever go away again.” Like there was some choice to it.  
  
Jesse swallows. Thinks he might let out some helpless laugh. “I won’t.” he murmurs, “I --I won’t.” loses his eyes to save himself from the fear, again. The embarrassment. He tries to swallow again but his throat is a shrinking pin-hole. “I love you.”  
  
Jack had some in with his own preoccupations. His own fears.  
  
But Jesse loves him. He can still feel it enough to say it: loves him. Wonders really never cease. Jack is blessed with mercy to hear it. To say it, then, still holding his boy, still aware and uncaring of the eyes on them. He should say it for Jesse to hear --for them all. But Jack’ forte has never been the whole story.  
  
He murmurs into Jesse’s hair. “Same to you, cowboy.”  
  
(A requiem:  
  
Jesse loves him, in that moment. They are inseparable. Fixed points on a map. A certainty.  
  
Jesse loves him, in that room. The one they say goodbye in.  
  
Twice. )


End file.
